Payments and bills are issued for product delivery cases automatically during batch processing or manually by a case worker. For example, the agency can issue benefit payments automatically when a batch is run at the start of every month. Case workers can also manually issue benefit payments on cases that have been approved and activated before system batch processing is run. By manually issuing payments, case workers can issue payments to clients that are paid by methods other than EFT immediately to clients. For example, if a client is eligible from 2 weeks ago, their payment schedule may be set up to be paid weekly by cash in advance. Typically the payment would not be issued immediately, it would be generated during the scheduled financials batch run. However, as the customer is due benefit arrears, the case worker can issue a front office payment immediately instead of making the client wait until the following week for a payment that is due now.
One-off manual payments can also be issued for benefit products if the system is down and a person is in dire financial need. In this case, the case worker can issue a check manually to the person without waiting for the scheduled batch job to run. The manual payment can subsequently be recorded on the system.