Understanding Accounting

Trust Accounts

Agency customers can deposit money into a trust account that the customer can drawn from when they need to pay fees for an application. This is helpful for customers that have a large amount of work they regularly perform in your jurisdiction, such as contractors or developers.

Civic Platform allows you to set up trust accounts for address, parcels, licensed professionals and contacts. The trust account functionality allows you to establish and maintain trust account information, perform trust account transactions, and print trust account reports.

With the trust account feature, users can set one primary trust account and associate the trust account with one record or multiple records.

Civic Platform can send an email notification to the trust account manager when the trust account balance drops below a certain amount. For example, if the trust account has a $100 threshold amount and the trust account falls below $50, Civic Platform sends an e‑mail notification to the trust account manager.

Administrators can assign one or more trust accounts as global to one or more modules, which makes the trust accounts available to all records within the specified module. This feature allows users to access a temporary trust accounts to process refunds.

Point of Sale and Cashier Session

Agency‑hosted sites can accept point of sale payments and set up a cash drawer to print receipts. Civic Platform is compatible with the Epson TM U675 printer and electronic cash drawers. Civic Platform uses these hardware components to print receipts for payments and endorse checks.

Civic Platform allows agencies to process point of sale fee transactions for which no related record exists. For example, the sale of a cup or a baseball hat with your agency logo and agency name on it is a point of sale item.

All modules in Civic Platform support the point of sale feature.

Civic Platform automatically invoices point of sale fee items; users can only add and void fee items.

Payment Processing

Civic Platform handles in-house and online payment processing. Civic Platform allows agency cashiers to locate and apply payments within an individual record. Civic Platform can accept payments online in the form of credit cards and checks. For online payments, Civic Platform integrates with third part payment providers, such as PayPal Pro4.3 or Official Payments CoBrand+. Civic Platform and Citizen Access process payments for credit cards and electronic checks.

Time Accounting Tracker

Civic Platform provides the ability for employees to record the amount of time spent in performing their daily tasks, the descriptions and costs of materials used while performing those tasks, and the usage of vehicles related to the tasks performed.

Civic Platform captures time accounting information in two contexts; 1) time and materials, and 2) time related to a particular process or group of processes. As employees log their activity in the Time Accounting Tracker, the agency calculates fees and charges, and applies them to a record. Agencies can also record costs, for reporting purposes, not related to processing any specific information. The agency can define any number of time accounting types and assign an hourly rate or percentage adjustment to use to for each type.