How will changing the date of a recurring payment affect an owner's payment for that month?

Question: "If an owner wants to change their Recurring Payment date from the Portal, how will that affect their payment for that month?"

Answer:

Homeowners have the freedom to change their payment dates and amounts from the Portal, but changing that payment date before a payment has been processed could affect how your database takes that payment and posts it.

Your Vantaca database looks at the rules on the Association Assessments screen to determine when an owner needs to be charged for an assessment and when an owner needs to be charged for a late fee if the assessment is not paid on time. This process happens after midnight for each database, approximately between 12 am and 3 am, and posts onto the owner's account for that day. For example, if a late fee rule is set to look for accounts that are past due on the 10th of each month, then between midnight and 3 am on the 10th, the system will look for assessment payments, and between midnight and 3 am on the 11th, the system will place that late fee on an owner's account.

Let's say a homeowner wishes to change their payment date from the 15th to the 10th, and they decide to do this on the 10th of the month, after the database has already searched for accounts set up to process payments on the 10th. The system will not retroactively look backwards in time to process an owner's payment. That means that, on the 11th, the system will look at that account, see that a payment has not yet been posted, and charge them a late fee.

If the owner wants to change their ACH information, and they do this in the period between when the ACH file is generated in your Association (In the example below, 3 days before the 5th.), then the changes will not be applied to this month's ACH. Keep in mind that you can make changes within that period manually. 

On the flip side, if an owner wishes to change their payment date from the 5th to the 10th, and they decide to make this change on the 9th, the system will process a second payment, in addition to the payment processed on the 5th.

If a homeowner claims they were charged twice, or not charged at all, despite a payment being set up, you can first look at their Activity Notes to determine when changes were made to payments by navigating to Homeowner > Activity Notes. That screen will show you exactly when they made changes on the Portal, and help you to solve the issue for them to avoid any payment issues in the future.