Ans) Oracle Advanced collections is the module which deals primarily with collection of your accounts receivable from the customers. Companies sell to customers on credit and these invoices become due as per the invoice terms. Typically you may specify Net45, which means 100% of the invoice amount is due in forty five days from the date of invoice.

However for some reasons the invoice is not paid on time. Some of the reasons could be invoice not sent to the customer, Invoice wrongly billed, Customer does not have funds or become bandrupt, customer does not agree with invoice amount/terms , invoice sent to the wrong address.

Most companies have billers and collectors managing the AR department. Billers are the first level contracts and they contact the customer to collect these outstanding amounts. The contact method may be mail, email, fax or phone call depends on their company terms.

Oracle AR initially had dunning letters functionality to remind the customers of their dues. The dunning level could be adjusted from a gentle reminder to collections advisory.

When the billers are not able to collect the amounts, the cases get transferred to collectors or at a later date to third party agencies for specialized in collection.

However the functionality was limited in scope which did not meet the modern day requirements. Once has built lot of functionality around Advanced Collections to automate the collection process. Advanced collections was a work bench in Receivables which now become a full fledged module with lot of features and automation.

What are the compones of Advanced Collections?
The key components of advanced collections are Collectors/Territories, Scoring Engine, Universal work queue/collectors work queue, Interaction History, Notes Set up,Dunning/Strategies, fulfillment/xml communication.

Scoring
Scoring calculates a score value for an object in the database. You can score following types of objects seeded in collections, or you can create new scoring objects.

Party, Account, or Bill To : The operational data level at which you do business with your customers.

Transaciton: A transaction created in Oracle Receivables, or originating in Oracle.

Loans or Oracle lease management. When determining delinquency status of transaction, Oracle collections creates a delinquency in a collection table. When a transaction is no longer delinquent, the status becomes current.

Case: A group of leasing contracts for a customer sharing the same bill to address, a private label and other contract parameters. Case only applies if you use Oracle lease management.

Concurrent Programs

The scoring engine harness concurrent program runs from one to five scoring engines. In addition, you can add a concurrent program to scoring engine, and when the scoring engine is run by the score engine harness concurrent program, the related concurrent programs also runs. For example you can add the strategy management concurrent program to assigns collections strategies based on the score results.

Scoring Components

The scoring component uses a select statement or a function to return a score value. For
Example, you can ask for the total number of delinquencies for a customer or how long a
Customer has been doing business with your company. Every scoring engine must have
at least one scoring component.
The values calculated by a scoring component are then assigned scores. Score range
numbers can be positive or negative numbers to two decimal places, and must account
for numbers from -99,999,999 to 99,999,999.. In Oracle Collections a higher score is
generally considered good and a lower score is considered bad.

You may have several Scoring components on which to score. For example some of the
components could be: Customer for ….Years, No of Delinquencies, Amt Outstanding,
Amt Overdue.
You will assign different weights to different components. You use Filters to limit the
scope of a scoring engine. Like you want to score transactions from a state, zip code.
You can use scoring engine to score transactions which will determine the status of
transactions delinquent, pre delinquent, Current, Overdue.
You could use another scoring engine to score customers / Account /Bill To.
A scoring engine harness might include both these scoring engines.

Preconfigured Scoring Engines

Preconfigured Scoring Components

eg:

The following tables describe the preconfigured scoring components for use with scoring engines.

Aging bucket line for account

Description : Identifies the oldest aged transaction for the account.

Object : Account

Type Value : Selects nvl(max(abl.bucket_sequence_num),0) from ar_Aging_buckets ab,ar_Aging_bucket_lines abl, IEX_App_preferences_vl iex, ar_payment_schedules arp, IEX_Delinquencies del where abl.aging_bucket_id =ab.aging_bucket_id and ab.bucket_name=iex.preference_value and iex.preference_name=’DUNNING PLAN AGING BUCKET’ and DEL.Payment_schedule_id=arp.payment_schedule_id and (sysdate-arp.due_Date)between abl.days_start and abl.days_to and del.cust_account_id=:account_id

Function : N

Previous Name : Account Aging Bucket Line.