What to do with those unpaid fees?
Understanding that many municipalities would rather allow an expired license to remain active year-after-year, we’ve created a mechanism to prepare “overdue fees” to be added to the next term when a renewal happens.
As mentioned above, Civic Review does not allow you to create new terms until the actual renewal happens. So, you have the ability to “stage the next term”. Think of this as a place where you can define what fees you want added to the normal renewal fees when the next renewal does happen.
In the sample above, this business license expired at the end of 2019. At the time of this writing (end of 2020) we’re preparing renewals for next year. Now, based on this screenshot above, if we stage a term, it would add fees to the 2020 year (the current year). But what we want is to stage the 2021 year. Also, we want to change the record to expire the end of this year so that the applicant gets a new round of reminder emails (reminder emails are sent out based on the expiration date). So, you’ll need to close out the year they were supposed to renew by manually “renewing” for 2020 even though they didn’t pay. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
1. Temporarily replace the contact email
You don’t want applicants getting emails saying “thanks for completing your renewal”. To get around this, clear out the contact email with either a fake one or your own email. Of course, you’ll want to remember what the real one is so you can change it back.
Change the contact email to anything but the real one (Pro-tip: copy/paste the contact email address into a word doc or the Internal Comments so you have it when you need to put it back in)
2. Manually renew the record to get them up-to-date
You can then “renew” the record to get them up-to-date. If they are multiple years behind, you can either renew it many times, or renew it once and then adjust the expiration date of the renewed term. Skip all the steps as you go through the renewal process.
3. Override term status to “Complete”
To manually close out this term, set its status to “Complete”. When you do this, the late fees will disappear, so if you plan on carrying over the balance due including late fees, you want to remember the total overdue amount (in this case, “$290”).
4. Make a note about the record and Stage Next Term
It’s probably a good idea to make a note about what you’ve just done, then you can click “Stage the next term”.
5. Add overdue fees that you want to be included in the next term
You can add as many fees as you like. These will get added to the regular renewal fees next term when they renew.
6. Replace the placeholder email with the real contact email
Now is a good time to replace the fake email with the real one so that email reminders go to the right place.
7. Now just let Civic Review do it’s thing
Now you’re all set. You can just wait and Civic Review will send out renewal request emails to this person along with all the rest. When they renew, they’ll see that extra “overdue” fee item along with all others.
Late Fees Calculate off of the Total Amount Due
Remember, percentage-based late fees will calculate off of the total amount due. So, if the renewal fees include overdue fees from previous years, and the late fee is 50% of renewal fees. That 50% calculation will include the overdue fees – so it would compound year-after-year if you let this go on for a license/permit. There’s no way to change the way this works, so you’ll have to make manual adjustments to fees to get around this.