Payment

Description:

Represents payments associated with a litigant (bonds and payment vouchers), as well as changes thereto.  If an existing payment is deleted or modified, an additional Payment (of Type = "Audit") will "back out" the original payment using a negative Amount, and a new Payment of Type = "Audit" will be provided if the payment was not deleted.

Attributes:

• • IDs

    • ID is the same as the ID on the Actor.

    • LitigantNumber- same as ID, without the initial segment indicating the court

    • CaseNumber- same as ID, without the two litigant-related segments at the end

    • TransactionType- distinguishes between payment vouchers and bonds.

    • Number- an ordinal/sequence ID for the bonds and vouchers (the nth bond or the nth voucher on the case). Since courts sometimes delete payments, these are occasionally re-used and should not be relied upon as the sole ID for a transaction. See below for more on cross-reference IDs.

    • Receipt- this is a "one-up" sequence number, the payor's receipt number. It is provided with the records of initial payments, not Audit records due to change/deletion. It does NOT change once set. But because receipt numbers are only six-digits, they do "roll over" occasionally, especially in large courts.

  • Type- indicates payment method (cash, personal check etc.)

    • • In courts using the JIMS case management system- payments originally receipted by a collection agency, the Type will be "Collect agn chk" or "Collect agn EFT", depending upon how the funds were conveyed to the court by the agency.

      • The "Audit" Type is used on records which correspond to the change/deletion of a previous payment.

  • ReceiptDate attribute (only for initial payment records, not Audit records provided due to change/deletion)- because the court can't "back date" a payment into a month which closed the previous day, the ReceiptDate must always represent the day the court got its money. So in the case of agency-receipted payments, this may not match the agency's receipt date. See also Date formats in Judici XML

  • Amount attribute- this reflects the entire payment, without regard to whether a bond has been applied or is still pending. On Audit type records, it represents the incremental amount by which the payment was changed.

  • Reference- this is an alpha-numeric field for the incoming check number.  For example:

    • The number on a check from the litigant or a collection agency.

    • An EFT transaction ID

  • ModificationType- not used

  • ID is the litigant ID corresponding to the ID on the Actor.

  • FullName

• Financial audit log attributes

  • CollectionsFeeDistribution- this indicates how much of the payment was applied to the "SA Collections" fee.  This can be used to verify whether the court is distributing a collection agency its fair share of incoming payment. 

    • If the court gets behind for whatever reason, they will at some point begin distributing more than the usual percentage and will eventually catch up.

    • Note that this fee amount is not provided for records whose Type is "Audit" (see above), or for A/R adjustment records.  So if the court changes an existing payment's distribution or the amount owed on a case, the web service will not provide a collections agency with any info on the amount of the new or revised collections fee distribution.  So those interested in tracking what portion of an A/R or changed payment is collections fees should speak with their Judici rep about how they can do so.

  • ReclassDate- indicates the date, if any, on which a pending bond was applied

Children:

Examples:

Notes:

When a payment is deleted, you get three <Payment> elements:

• • A negative one of Type "Audit", which vacates the payment.

  • A positive one of Type "Audit" which parks the same amount in a bond on the case

  • A negative one of the original payment Type, for the same amount when the bond is transferred off of the case

When a payment is changed, you get two <Payment> elements:

• • A negative one of Type "Audit", "backing out" the payment

  • A positive on for the new payment amount

 If the payment was changed, you get a back-out and a new payment for the full new amount.  The new payment has the original Type (Cash, Money Order, etc.).  All such records share the Number associated with the original payment.

In courts using the JIMS case management system- the effect of an NSF check- if the court accepts personal checks from defendants (which is rare) and such a check bounces, a Payment having negative Amount is entered as an adjusting entry. The negative entry usually has no cross-reference to the original payment.

If a collection agency is not the first one active in a given court, it is theoretically possible that they might receive payments which happened after the specified COLDATE on which that agency's involvement began, but on cases which were referred prior to the agency's involvement.