Patent Application
20120011061
This application incorporates by reference the entire contents of U.S. Non-Provisional application Nos. ______ (Attorney Docket Nos. 11884/511301, 511401, 511501, 511601, and 511801) filed on even date.
The present invention is generally directed to a social service payment system. In particular, the present invention is directed to a system and method of calculating net payment to recipients of social service benefits.
Social service agencies may provide a wide range of social benefits to the public. For example, in U.S., the social security agency may provide social security benefits in the form of monthly payments to people who are entitled to social security benefits. Other examples of social benefits may include housing allowances, food subsidies, disability insurance payments, unemployment insurance payments, and public pension payments.
A recipient (or beneficiary) of social services may be entitled to receive benefits from multiple agencies. The benefits are commonly in the form of monetary payments. The gross benefit payment may be subject to a variety of deductions before the recipient receives a net payment. The net calculation is a process to calculate net payments and which is coupled between social service decision-making process and the actuation of payment to the benefit recipient. The social service decision-making process may use a gross payment process to generate a data object called gross payment document including information relating to the gross amount that the recipient is entitled to and use a deduction process to generate another data object called deduction plan document including information relating to the variety of deductions.
The deduction process may withhold a certain amount of money from the gross payment and to redistribute the withheld amount to fulfill other obligations. One type of deductions may be based on individualized decisions. The individual decision-based deductions may include periodical fee deductions (e.g., rents, cable fees, and utility payments), claim deduction (e.g., liabilities to agencies and child supports), and personal savings. Another type of deductions may be based on rules. The rule-based deductions may include income taxes (e.g., federal and state income taxes) and social benefit taxes (e.g., social security tax).
Because of their diverse objectives of diverse social services, different social services may be mandated by different laws and subject to different regulations. For example, certain social service benefits may not be subject to certain taxes, while others do. Further, in social service arena, deductions from gross payment may require particular care because they may reduce payments to people in need. Usually, the deductions are carried out by social service case workers who may consider many factors in determining deductions.
Traditional payroll applications such as SAP payroll solution are not specifically designed for social services management. Although payroll applications may handle mass payments to a large number of recipients from a single income source, they are not designed to make payments to the large number of recipients from different social service programs, each having different deductions and posting payments to different accounts. Therefore, these payroll applications may not be integrated naturally with social service functionalities Furthermore, the total ownership cost (TOC) for operating a payroll application is usually high.
Therefore, there is a need for system and method that is specifically designed for automatically calculating net payments to a benefit recipient in social services.
Embodiments of the present invention may include a method and system of generating net calculation documents for issuing benefits to a recipient. The method and system may include receiving gross payment documents (GPDs) each including a plurality of gross payment items (GPIs) each including a benefit amount the recipient is entitled to and/or receiving deduction plan documents (DPDs) each including a plurality of deduction plan items (DPIs) each including a deduction amount from a corresponding GPI. Responsive to receiving one of an update to at least one of the GPIs and at least one new GPIs, the method and system may further include grouping all GPIs into groups based on pre-determined criteria, determining a time period that extends over all GPIs that are affected by the updated/new GPIs and need recalculation, determining net calculation units (NCUs) each unit having an identical payment frequency, dividing the NCUs into homogeneous time slices based on benefit payment dates, and for each time slice, generating a NCD including a header, a plurality of GPIs and DPIs for the time slice.
The net calculation process may receive both the gross payment document and the deduction plan document for generating a data object called a net calculation document. The net calculation document may contain information for executing social service payments to the benefit recipient. The output of the net calculation in the form of net calculation document may trigger standard payment processes such as periodic billing 114, invoicing 116, and accounting 118. Like net calculation, these standard functionalities may be implemented on the backend ERP.
The server may be configured with a CRM database application (not shown). The CRM application may support a first gross payment calculation module 212 for generating a gross payment document and a second deduction plan module 210 for generating a deduction plan document. The gross payment document may be a data object that contains information relating to the gross amount of money that a social benefit recipient may be entitled to; the deduction plan document may be a data object that contains information relating to deductions from the gross payment.
The server may further be configured with an ERP backend database application. The ERP application may receive the gross payment document and the deduction plan document from the CRM application to generate a net calculation document. The ERP application may be configured to perform: responsive to an update of at least one of the deduction plan document and gross payment document, grouping data items contained in the received gross payment document into net calculation units based on certain characteristics of these data items 214, determining decision-based deductions and rule-based deductions that are applicable to the gross payment document 216, and then generating a net calculation document 218 based on the net calculation units and the determined deductions.
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The method may include receiving a gross payment document that contains at least one new gross payment item (GPI) or receiving a new deduction plan document created by a social service case worker 402. At 404, the method may determine which data object has been updated. If the gross payment document is updated with new GPIs, at 406, the method may group the new and existing active GPIs based on a set of criteria. For example, the GPIs may be grouped based on payment recipients/deduct-from-party, benefit programs, the frequency of payments/deductions, or the due dates of payments. GPIs with identical or substantially similar grouping criteria may be grouped into respective groups. A payment family may be a group for one or more benefit programs (SSP) that have the same payment frequencies. SSP with different payment frequency may not be grouped into one payment family.
At 408, the method may determine a net calculation unit (NCU) period for all groups. The net calculation unit period may be the time span over all of the grouped GPIs. At 410, the method may determine net calculation units (NCUs). NCUs are groups of Gross Payment Items (GPIs) to a same payment recipient, a same payment family (implicitly, same payment frequency), a same due date rule all within a defined net calculation unit period. Thus, the NCUs may be determined by selecting all activated GPIs that have the same grouping criteria and have due period within the net calculation unit period. The determination of net calculation unit may include identifying existing GPIs within the same NCU period. Identical calculations may be applied to all GPIs within the same NCU.
At 412, the method may build time slices for GPIs. Time slice is a time period that spans one or more payment frequency intervals (or billing periods) to assist the calculation process. The time slice may vary during net calculation (e.g., becomes more granular). For example, the time slice may become more granular during tax calculation. If the tax range changes within one time slice, the original time slice may be split into two time splices. The time slices may initially be obtained by dividing a GPI into time slices delimited at the borders between different GPIs. At the end, the original time period of the GPIs may be divided into homogenous time slices each of which has a same start and end date for payments, a same amount of payment, and a same due date. The combination of all time slices may cover the time period of all active GPIs. Finally, at 414, the method may create a net calculation document for each time slice.
If the deduction plan document is updated with new deduction plan items, at 416, the method may determine deduction start and end dates and based on the deduction start date, select deduction plan items (DPIs) that may need recalculation. Thus, the deduction start date may be retroactive to a date prior to current date or prospective to a date in the future. GPIs and DPIs that fall within the range of the start and end dates may be activated for net calculations. At 418, the method may determine net calculation unit by selecting all activated GPIs for the received GPD that may have the same grouping criteria and have due period within the net calculation unit period. The determination of net calculation unit may include identifying existing GPIs within the same NCU period. At 420, the method may build time slices for GPIs. The original time period of the GPIs may be divided into time slices each of which may have a same start and end date for payments, a same amount of payment, and a same due date. The combination of all time slices may cover the time period of all the GPIs. At 422, the method may assign deductions or DPIs to the active GPIs based on deduction priority. In one embodiment, some deductions may have higher priorities than others. Therefore, the deductions may be assigned according to which the deductions may be taken out first. Finally, at 414, the method may create a net calculation document for each time slice.
The net calculation document (NCD) may be a data object that may include a header and data items associated with the header. The NCD header may include data entries relating to start date of the payment period, end date of the payment period, due date (or date for payment), payment family (or social service program), payment recipient, due date rule, status of the NCD (such as Open, Billed, Revised, Cancelled, Reversed), billing document number, and reversal billing document number. The NCD header may also include additional user-defined fields. Thus, for each due date, a separate NCD document header may be created to serve as input for the subsequent billing process. The NCD data items may include data entries relating to gross payment items and/or deduction plan items, monetary amount, currency, benefit recipient id, item process class (such as regular or unemployment), deduction type (decision-based or rule-based), deduction plan item categories (such as third party, allocated deduction etc.), deduct-to party, and user-defined fields. In an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, different NCD headers may share a same NCD data item to form different NCDs. For example, when a recipient is entitled to receive identical gross payments and deductions for the months of January, February, and March, three NCD headers for January, February, and March may be created, each being linked to the same NCD item representing the gross payment and deductions of the benefit recipient.
Responsive to receiving gross payment document 1 reflecting an update to its GPI for the change of 500 to 600 EUR and gross payment document 2 reflecting updates to its GPIs for the change of start date change and amount changes, the net calculation process may group the updated GPIs into groups based on the criteria of homogeneous payments. For this example, the GPIs may be divided into three groups with Group A covering April 2009, Group B covering May and June 2009, and Group C covering July-September 2009. In Group A, the total amount of payment is 500+1,000 EUR=1,500 EURs. In Group B, the total amount is 600+1,000 EUR=1,600 EURs. In Group C, the total amount is 600+2,000=2,600 EURs. Next, the net calculation may determine the net calculation unit period based on activated GPIs. For this example, the NCU period spans from April 2009 to September 2009 since it is the time period that the GPIs need updates. Further, NCUs are determined. As discussed above, NCUs are groups of Gross Payment Items (GPIs) to a same payment recipient, a same payment family (implicitly, same payment frequency), a same due date rule all within a defined net calculation unit period. For this example, the NCUs are incidentally the same as the time period for each group, i.e., corresponding to the time period of April, May-June, and July-September 2009. Finally, the time slices in this example are monthly based on payment dates are monthly.
The various computer systems described herein may each include a storage component for storing machine-readable instructions for performing the various processes as described and illustrated. The storage component may be any type of machine readable medium (i.e., one capable of being read by a machine) such as hard drive memory, flash memory, floppy disk memory, optically-encoded memory (e.g., a compact disk, DVD-ROM, DVD±R, CD-ROM, CD±R, holographic disk), a thermomechanical memory (e.g., scanning-probe-based data-storage), or any type of machine readable (computer readable) storing medium. Each computer system may also include addressable memory (e.g., random access memory, cache memory) to store data and/or sets of instructions that may be included within, or be generated by, the machine-readable instructions when they are executed by a processor on the respective platform. The methods and systems described herein may also be implemented as machine-readable instructions stored on or embodied in any of the above-described storage mechanisms.
Although the present invention has been described with reference to particular examples and embodiments, it is understood that the present invention is not limited to those examples and embodiments. Further, those embodiments may be used in various combinations with and without each other. The present invention as claimed therefore includes variations from the specific examples and embodiments described herein, as will be apparent to one of skill in the art.
