Spoiler alert: you should never process a pre-payment using a date in the future. The longer explanation is we recently received a call from a collector who was having difficulty posting a payment to an invoice that already had partial payments posted to it. After looking at the previously posted payments, we discovered that the last payment posted had been done using an effective date in the future date. The payment was a pre-payment with a posted date of 3/1/2019; however, the effective date was 9/1/2019.

It’s important to know the difference between the posted date and the effective date.

• The posted date is the system date the payment was posted on and not a date you can change when entering payments.
• The effective date is used to calculate interest and can be changed to reflect the date the customer actually made the payment, either in person or by mail (postmark). The effective date tells the system how many days of interest should be charged for a payment.

In a previous update, we stopped the ability to enter a date in the future when paying an invoice. However, we did not add an edit to stop that from happening when posting pre-payments. Why does this matter when it’s just a pre-payment and no interest is involved? The problem arises when you try to make a payment, or assign a credit, with a date before the effective date of the last payment. If you try to post a payment any time before the last effective date, an error message will display stating “A value was specified for the MaxDate Property that is lower than the current value of MinDate.” Basically, this is because the system knows you cannot post a payment before the last payment’s effective date, as it would have to change the interest charged/collected.

So what do you need to know from all of this? In the next update we will add an edit that will stop you from selecting a date in the future. Until then, don’t select a date in the future when entering pre-payments.