Effective Date

Payment, bill and adjustment financial transactions are assigned an effective date. This is the date that the debit or credit amount affects the obligation's balance and is important for penalty and interest calculations. The following are some examples of how the effective date is set:

The system requires an effective date by default. However, it is possible to use a feature configuration setting to allow effective date to be optional for new debit adjustments. In this case the FT's "new charge" switch must be checked. This functionality assumes that a separate process is able to determine the proper effective date based on other information and can update the financial transaction at that time to populate the effective date properly. For example, if there is a miscellaneous charge that should only be considered effective after the taxpayer is informed of the charge, the adjustment can be created as a "new charge" with no effective date. The process that produces the correspondence to the taxpayer to inform them of the charge is responsible for updating the FT to set the effective date (and reset the "new charge" switch).
CAUTION:
The base product's penalty and interest calculation logic will ignore any financial transactions that do not reference an effective date. It means that the amount will not factor into any calculation basis amount.
Fastpath: Refer to Configuring Effective Date as Optional for configuration steps.