Current eMessage > Product > December 2018

Product Spotlight

Real-time balance information and payments with CDS Global

By Lori Bayne, Customer Master Product Owner

At MBTC this fall Craig Aman announced MACC was pursuing real-time balances and payment processing with CDS Global, which is the company MACC partners with to deliver eBill. We are excited to announce the first batch of companies successfully migrated to this enhanced payment processing this past month!

To recap the real-time balance feature
When one of your customers logs into eBill today, they view the current balance, which is the last statement balance. The balance does not reflect any payments made outside of eBill, such as checks or ACH transactions. Once your company transitions to using real-time payments, customers will see current amounts with all previous payments applied, regardless of how they were made. This allows the customer to only pay the true account balance, instead of the last statement balance when they process a one-time payment online.

How do real-time payments work?
With this enhancement, if your company opens a connection to MACC, anytime a customer accesses your company’s eBill system, a web service call retrieves the current account balance from your Customer Master database. This would be the true account balance from the A/R Balance screen in Customer Master and takes into account any payments made to the account since the last billing.

After that payment is made within eBill, CDS Global will send MACC another web service call with the real-time payment information. Again, with a connection open to MACC, the payment is entered on that Customer Master account with a pending status. The normal payment batch process will still occur at night and you will retrieve the entire batch of CDS Global payments after 8:00 p.m. (Central).

We still ask that you import your payment batch to ensure all payments have been entered on the accounts for the day in case there was an internet transmission issue involving any payments, as well as your enrollment files. Customer Master has been enhanced to validate each payment and will not allow duplicate payments to be entered on the accounts. Normal payment batch processing and balancing can occur. The real-time payments will be a handy feature for those last minute payments made right before delinquent processing and cutoffs.

Ready to start using real-time payments?
Client feedback has been encouraging and we are excited to move more companies over to this enhanced processing after your Customer Master 18.2 upgrade. Please contact your eMACC support staff, Client Relations Manager or Account Manager for information on how to begin using real-time payments.