Understanding Conversations

Collectors and receivable managers are challenged with keeping track of outstanding customer payments and automating the follow up on unfulfilled promises. Streamlining of this business process enables users to identify the risk of future promises and to indicate that a pre-emptive follow up will be required for any new promises. A collections analyst can enter a promise to pay by a customer and track and manage that promise within the Conversations component.

Prior to entering a new promise date conversation in the Conversations component, you can predefine the number of days that will be tolerated past the promise date before you will take further action, the percentage of the payment amount that you are willing to accept, and select a broken promise action, as well as indicate that a user can override these values on the Promise Options page (Set Up Financials/Supply Chain, Product Related, Receivables, Credit/Collections, Promise Date Options.) These values appear as default field values in the Promise of Payment group box of the Conversations page.

Condition Monitor automatically processes promised payments. Condition Monitor selects the CPDR (Customer Promise Date Review) condition and processes the promised payment conversations that required a review and a creates appropriate action list items. Condition Monitor also automatically processes promised payments that have broken promises by selecting the CPDB (Customer Promise Date Broken) condition, which selects the broken promises and creates action list items if necessary. The Customer Promise Date Broken program will close promise date conversations with a status of broken, no promise date action, and no review scheduled after the promise date. It will also close promise date conversations when a user selects the Done check box on the Conversations page, which indicates that the broken promise was reviewed and no review date was selected after the promise date.

The CFLU (Conversations Follow Up) condition will not select promise date conversations. When a collections analyst creates a new conversation on the Conversations page and selects the Promise of Payment check box, the conversation is considered a promise date conversation and the promise status will be set to Open. Once a conversation is marked as a promise of payment conversation, the collections analyst must enter a promise date and the amount that the customer promised to pay in order to save the conversation.

Depending on the promise made by the customer and a review of this promise, the system will assign a Promise Status of:

• Open

• Kept

• Broken

• Cancelled

• None

  This status is used for conversations that are not promise date conversations.

The status of a conversation can be New, Open, or Closed. This table displays each of the promise statuses that are possible based on the status of the conversation.

The Promise Status is typically set and updated by Condition Monitor processing. When a promise date conversation is created, the promise status is set to Open. Condition Monitor will update the status to either Kept or Broken. Promise date conversations are closed manually by the user or automatically by the Condition Monitor program. These are the general rules governing the conversation status:

• When a user creates a promise date conversation, the conversation status is New. When users want Condition Monitor to process the conversation for promise dates, they update the status of the promise date conversation to Open.

• If the Condition Monitor evaluates a promise as Kept, the conversation will be closed.

• If the Condition Monitor evaluates a promise as Broken with no broken promise action, the conversation will be closed.

• If the Condition Monitor evaluates a promise as Broken and there is a broken promise action, the conversation remains open until the user selects Done check box to indicate that the action has been completed and closes the conversation.

• Any user can open a closed conversation and manually override the promise status. If the user overrides the promise status to a status of Kept or Broken, the conversation can be closed. If the promise status is Open, then the conversation cannot be closed. If the promise status has been overridden to Cancelled, the conversation can still remain open.

  A user can exclude a promise from being included in the metrics, mark a promise as fulfilled, or override an unfulfilled promise as fulfilled.

  To override a promise status, a user must select the Override Promise Status check box and an override reason. A user can change the promise status and change the reason code multiple times, but you cannot change override status. This indicates that the promise status has been overridden by a user and has been changed automatically by Condition Monitor. If users make a mistake, they can select and save the appropriate status.

  A broken promise action is based on a valid action, which you set up in the system. The user id for a broken promise action is associated with the user that receives an action item based on the broken promise action. If the user assigned to the broken promise action reviews the broken promise and selects the Done check box, the promise status is changes to broken and the conversation is closed.

  If a payment is received, the system can set the action items for review or set a broken promise as completed and the action no longer appears on the user's action list. Metrics are reported for each customer based on a promise to pay status of Kept, Broken, and Open. However, metrics are not tracked for promise payments with a status of Cancelled, because these promises were intentionally cancelled with the intention of not recording or reporting them as a promise to pay. A history of the status changes is not collected or reported. This includes any history of manual overrides that change a status from Broken to Kept, Broken to Open, or Broken to Cancelled.

  Users can create, update, and review promise date conversations on Conversations tab of the Collections Workbench in PeopleSoft Receivables select (Accounts Receivable, then select Customer Accounts, then select Collections Workbench.)

See Understanding the Collections Workbench