Why doesn’t Aguardion natively support traditional bi-monthly due dates?
We have found that using specific calendar ‘dates’ (or put another way, a specific calendar period of services rendered) as a way to track payments doesn’t work as well as simply using a day ‘count’ and we would strongly urge to get away from that.
Aguardion's pool system is built around the concept of prepaid, 'pool balance' that is deducted from as services are rendered (like a burner phone, jail commissary account, or a gift card). This design was chosen for numerous reasons that are a bit beyond the scope of this article: suffice to say, it comes down to efficiency and ease of collection.
Aguardion customers are usually best served by getting away from the concept of 'due dates'. Instead, think of it in terms of remaining balance. The goal shouldn't be to get them to pay 'on their due date', but rather, to always be keeping their balance in the green.
This often requires a bit of reeducation on the part of existing clients, but is going to save a lot of time long term and make a lot of paperwork (both digital and virtual) eventually redundant.
Instead of having Invoices/due dates (which have to take into account the daily rate, 28, 29 (leap year), 30 or 31 days in a month), when the client calls up asking for his due date, you tell them "you have x days until you have a zero balance and are in violation". By going to a remaining balance approach, you remove numerous potential opportunities for mistakes.
Furthermore, the fact that end dates are often functionally meaningless further makes this sort of billing to rigid for this industry.
Instead, we urge customers to set an amount of time you want people to be ahead (the most common is 14 days). When people ask when they are due, you say: “xx days”.
Taking best practice further- many of our clients always attempt to collect as much as they can during contact with the client: It's easier to refund later than try and collect on delinquent accounts.
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