, escrow accounts, revolving charge accounts, and mortgage accounts. Each of your agency-defined customer account types must fall into one of these four categories.Tenant Accounts Receivable supports four different categories of customer account types: accounts receivable accounts, escrow accounts, revolving charge accounts, and mortgage accounts. Each of your agency-defined customer account types must fall into one of these four categories.
Use this category for standard receivables accounts. Accounts of this type require the customer to pay off any outstanding balance at the end of each month.
Use this category for escrow accounts, such as security deposits, FSS escrow accounts, and tenant savings plans. Money added to an account of this type is a liability to your agency and an asset to the customer. You can allow customers to accrue interest on the balances of these accounts. You can set up receivables (amounts currently due) on these accounts, but the account balances are not affected until actual payments are made.
Use this category for revolving charge accounts, such as repayment agreements, retroactive rent agreements, and promissory notes. A customer with a revolving charge account keeps an overall account balance and owes a monthly receivable to the account. (For example, the customer may owe your agency a total of $1000, but the minimum monthly payment is only $50.) Your agency can charge interest on the balances of these accounts.
Use this category for mortgages (e.g., for a mortgage in the Section 8 Homeownership program or for a home purchase financed by your agency). A customer with this type of account has a mortgage (principal) balance, and the amount of principal and interest charged to the account is different each month. You will set up separate escrow accounts for any escrow amounts related to a mortgage, such as taxes or insurance.
You can subdivide these four categories into multiple agency-defined customer account types. For example, you might have a customer account type for security deposits and a separate account type for pet deposits, both of which would fall under the Escrow category. Each of your customer account types has an account description and is assigned to one of the four categories. Here are some customer account types you might consider:
| Account Description | Category |
| Collection Loss | AR |
| FSS Escrow | Escrow |
| Homeownership | Mortgage |
| Pet Deposit | Escrow |
| Repayment | Revolving Charge |
| Security Deposit | Escrow |
| Tenant Accounts Receivable | AR |
For each account type, you can also identify an order in which to apply payments, various default formats for printed documents, and whether interest accrues to accounts of that type. The payment “apply order” lets you rank the default order in which the program applies customer payments to outstanding balances for different account types. For example, if a customer owes on both an AR account and a security deposit account, you may wish to apply a payment to the AR account first. If a customer has outstanding balances in two different accounts with the same rank (e.g., if you ranked two account types the same or if the customer has two accounts of the same type), the program will apply a payment first to the oldest outstanding balance.
Hint: For any individual payment, you can override the default apply order by applying the payment manually to outstanding balances.
If you use the Custom Report Writer program, you can assign to each account type a default printed format for contracts, statements, registers, and adjustment vouchers.
You can also designate whether interest accrues to customer account types. See "Setting Up Interest for Account(s)"
After you create your customer account type records, you will assign each customer account type to one or more developments that use the account type. You will then set up the developmental account mapping for the receivables and revenue accounts for each type of transaction within each account type.
Finally, after you fully set up your customer account types, you can use them to create individual accounts for customers.
Within TAR, there are four types of accounts that need to be setup:
| 1. | Accounts receivable account: The master account that all customers have. This type of account records charges and payments. Each charge on the account is due in full as of the date of the charge. Periodic payments are allowed, but any charge not paid or credited off is past due as soon as the charge date is passed. |
| 2. | Escrow account: An escrow account is a security deposit, pet deposit, FSS escrow account, or other account where the value on the account accumulates or increases as payments are made into the account. There are no charges, thus no transactions associated with this type of account. The user may set up a receivable (not a charge), to show how much the tenant should be paying, but receivables are not associated with any GL account number. Thus, escrow accounts do not create a journal transaction. The payment, however, does create a transaction which credits the account and debits the cash drawer. The balance of the escrow account continues to accumulate as a negative balance to show that the HA owes the tenant the amount reflected in the account. |
| 3. | Revolving credit account: This is a repayment agreement type account. Amounts charged on the primary accounts receivable account are transferred to this account and this transfers the balance due. Then, recurring receivable amounts are defined for the monthly payment amounts that should be paid to reduce the overall balance due. There are no transactions associated with this account as all charge items have already been recorded on the AR account and transferred. |
| 4. | Mortgage account: This account type is similar to the revolving credit account in setup and actions. |
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