It was great to see so many of you last week at the Tax Collectors’ Association Annual Conference in North Conway. We want to follow-up with a few items that we discussed as a group.

For those of you that were not able to attend, we had a productive break-out session on Thursday afternoon, during which we:

• Reviewed the changes we will make later in the year to the MS-61 process to accommodate the DRA’s new PDF form. (Summary: don’t worry about it, but if you find yourself typing numbers into a PDF three months from now then you’re doing it wrong.)
• Summarized the changes we will be including in a “mini” update that we’ll distribute soon. (A summary of which can be found in our online documentation.)
• Discussed your ideas and requests.

For those of you that were able to attend, you may remember that we indicated we would be distributing the update this past Monday. You also may be wondering where it is. Well based on the feedback and some of the new ideas, we decided to go back into our basement workshop and stuff a few more things into the pending update before sending it out into the world.  So we’ve done that and we will be testing it in the next few days and hope to be able to distribute the update early next week.

Here’s what we’ve included based on our session last week:

• A system option that allows you to be prompted for selection/input of a mailing address at the time the receipt is printed — not just when it is reprinted. (The default system behavior is still to not prompt on the original print.)
• A total on the Interest Calculator (i.e. sum of interest and the principal on which you calculated the interest).
• A total on the property tax bill and the utility bill that shows the sum of the current due amount and any “other due amount” you’ve chosen to include. We’ve also increased the size/prominence of both the “other due amount” and the “total” (so no doubt they’ll all get paid in full this next warrant). Note, that these changes only apply to the full page bills. The old style bill — i.e. the format in which each third of the page is essentially the same and the bottom third is intended for you to tear off an office copy before mailing — has not changed as there simply is not enough space on that bill to add/increase text.

So look for an email in the next week or so distributing this mini update.  And we’ll let you know later in the fall when we have another update that includes the MS-61 PDF changes.