Refunding Deposits

To refund a deposit, you simply need to change the deposit contract's state to pending stop. The system does everything else (i.e., calculates interest and refunds the deposit to the customer).

There are three ways in which a deposit contract's state can become pending stop:

  • The Deposit Refundbackground process (referred to by the batch control ID DEPRFND) make a deposit contract pending stop when it detects that the customer meets the automatic refund criteria. Refer to Defines The Conditions That Cause The System To Automatically Refund A Deposit for a description of how to define the conditions that control automatic refund.
  • An operator, at their discretion, may refund a deposit by stopping the deposit contract using Start/Stop Service (the same page used to stop all other types of contracts). This page simply changes the deposit contract's state to pending stop.
  • The system changes the state of a deposit contract to pending stop when it recognizes that all other contract's of its deposit class have also been stopped. This may be necessary, for example, when a customer's utility contracts have been severed for non-payment. Refer to Deposit Seizures When Other Contracts Are Stopped for more information.

The system changes the state of a pending stop contract to stopped when the process responsible for Finalizing Pending Stops next runs.

When a deposit contract becomes stopped, the system calculates interest through the stop date. Refer to Controls Interest Calculation for a description of how interest is calculated.

Note: If you can't wait for this process to run, simply display the deposit contract on Contract- Main Information and press the stop button.

When the stopped deposit contract is final billed, the system produces a final bill segment that shows the deposit amount being returned to the customer. When the bill segment's bill is completed, the deposit is refunded to the customer as per the deposit refund algorithm on the deposit's deposit class. Refer to Controls How Deposits Are Refunded To A Customer for a description of how a deposit is refunded.

CAUTION: None of the base package deposit refund algorithms create an A/P adjustment when the deposit contract is final billed. Rather, they depend on the write-off preprocessing to actually refund the deposit to the customer.