We have changed the Get Assessing Owners dialog box (Utilities | Get Assessing Owners) to simplify the process by which you update the current owner on invoices already in your system. Previously, the Get Assessing Owners dialog box had radio buttons to import changes “Only For Owners That Have Been Edited by Assessing” and “For All Owners Maintained In Assessing”, with an additional check box to “Verify Billing History For All Invoices.” This was an attempt to provide options to make the process a bit quicker in certain situations, but mostly it just led to confusion over when to use which option.

With the 6.9.8 update we eliminated the radio buttons. Now just select Utilities | Get Assessing Owners and press the Import button.

If you utilize Avitar Tax Collect in conjunction with the Avitar Utility Billing system to generate water and/or sewer invoices the “Verify Billing History For All Invoices” option will be checked by default (and disabled so you cannot uncheck it). This will ensure that current owners on invoices that were imported from Utility Billing are updated by the process.

If you are not using Avitar Utility Billing you still have the option to check the “Verify Billing History For All Invoices”, but you only need to choose this option if the most recent Get Assessing Owners failed in the middle of the process or you have really old invoices that might have been imported from a different tax program. It will never hurt anything to check “Verify Billing History For All Invoices”, but the import process will be noticeably slower.

Unfortunately, as part of the 6.9.8 update, when the “Verify Billing History…” option was checked the subsequent report of current owner and address changes was incorrectly reporting way too many parcels that didn’t actually have owner or address changes. With the 6.9.9 update we are currently distributing this has been fixed. You should find the report of owner changes generated when using the “Verify Billing History…” option to be significantly shorter and more accurate.

Please use the following link to access our online documentation for more information on this topic: Get Assessing Owners.