Rental Bill Hold and Release

Some customers’ bills may require special handling each month. For example, there may be a need to review a particular customer’s bill before mailing. Another customer’s bill may be printed locally and hand delivered, or a customer may require a special purchase order number to be verbally given each month for their rental. The TrackAbout Rental Calculation Module allows a hold status to be placed on customers that require any kind of special handling each month. Placing customers on hold will cause their bills to go into hold status. Held bills can then be easily reviewed and released from hold as part of a rental run.

Setting a Hold for a Customer

A Hold is set from the Rental section of the Customer Detail View. After selecting a Hold Status of Held, the Hold Reason drop-down list will appear. Contact TrackAbout to create a customized list of hold reasons. A Notes field allows for entry of more detailed information about this specific hold. These notes will be displayed in the rental bill review screens of TrackAbout, but will never be shown to the customer.

Reviewing Bills Which Are Held

After rental bills have been generated from the Rental Billing Period Dashboard, it is possible to see bills that are held and not held.

Bills that are held will not proceed to the next step in the rental run process until they are released from hold. Specifically, this means that clicking on Create File For Printer will not create a print output file for the bills in the Hold Count column. Therefore, the status of these bills will not change to Printed. Each non-zero number in the Hold Count column is a link to the Bill Review - List screen. This screen lists a summary of the Rental Bills which have been held, including their Hold Status and Hold Notes.

Each item in the Rental Invoice column is a link to the Bill Review - Individual Bill, which shows the actual invoice. The invoice shows that the bill is on hold with the Reason. However, the Hold Notes do not appear in the Bill Review - Individual Bill screen.

Marking a Bill as No Longer Held

From either the Bill Review page where multiple rental invoices are listed, or the Bill Review detail page where one rental bill is shown in detail, it is possible to remove a hold on a rental bill. Do this by choosing Release Hold from the drop-down list in the Action for this Bill field and then clicking Go.

When viewing bills in the individual view, selecting Release Hold and clicking Go will update the hold status of the bill and then refresh the page. If the form at the top of the Bill Review page is set to show just held bills, then this will cause the bill to be no longer shown on this page because it is no longer held. The result is that when working in the individual view as bills are released from hold, they typically disappear from the screen. These bills can still be viewed by changing the selection criteria at the top of the Bill Review page. This Release Hold action removes the hold just on the selected bill(s), but does not remove the hold status from the customer. This means that the rental bill created for the next rental run will again go into this hold status. Removing the hold status for a customer is done from the Rental section of the Customer Detail View.