Changing the Customer

Changing the Customer on a Service and changing the Customer on a Payment Obligation are not necessarily the same thing. In general, when it is time to change who is paying for a Service, this will require that a new Payment Obligation be added, as of the effective date of the change. If you simply change the Customer on an existing Payment Obligation, you are effectively changing history, rather than recording an ongoing change. This is mainly something you would do to correct things if you had accidentally put the wrong Customer in place. If you keep in mind the question: "Who is responsible to pay this, and for what period of time?" it makes it clear what should be done.

New Customer taking over payments	Add a Payment Obligation
Oops, put in the wrong Customer	Change the Customer on the existing Payment Obligation
Delete a Payment Obligation	Removing a Payment Obligation

To add a new Payment Obligation, start from the Service form and click on the Add button next to the Payment Obligations section in the middle.

It will ask you for the effective date of the new Payment Obligation and open it. You then need to set who the new customer should be from there.

If you accidentally add a Payment Obligation you don't need, you can delete it. First, open the Payment Obligation you want to delete. You can do this by double-clicking on the line that shows the Payment Obligation information here on the Service screen, or by clicking on the View button to the right. Then go to File (within the Payment Obligation) and select Delete Payment Obligation. If the existing one now has a date, be sure to remove that date so it doesn't stop prematurely.

You can remove or change the Customer on a Payment Obligation simply by pressing the corresponding button. However, the system first will warn you of the consequences of doing this. To make sure you really want to change the Customer, the system gives you two notices before going ahead with it.

Here is an example of the series of warnings you get when trying to change the Customer on an existing Payment Obligation:

If you answer Yes to the second warning, you still have one more chance to change your mind. At that point, the Person Finder will appear. Find or add the person you want to be the Customer, or hit Cancel to bail out.

In the case where there are multiple Services covered by a Client Payment Obligation, changing the Customer will affect all Service Payment Obligations that are included within the Client Payment Obligation. In that case, you will get extra warnings about that, just to help make it clear what you are about to do.

Figure 211: Warnings when Changing the Customer on a Service Payment Obligation that's part of a Client Payment Obligation