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Making Periodic Escrow Adjustments

Once you have completed the escrow analysis, you are ready to make adjustments and notify the homeowners of the changes.

To manage adjustment notifications
  1. Open the Finances tab in the Keystone ribbon and click Analysis.
    The Escrow Analysis screen appears.
  2. Click the Notification Setup button on the Escrow Analysis screen.
    The Escrow Payment Posting screen appears. You will select and prepare the adjustment letters and post the required escrow schedule adjustments for the selected homeowners here.
  3. To choose which homeowner records appear on this screen, use the Select Homeowners Including drop-down list, as well as the Show pane.
    By default, Keystone will display homeowners whose adjustments have not been posted, regardless of which payees they have obligations to. To display only homeowners with payments scheduled for a particular payee, choose that payee from the Select Homeowners Including drop-down list.

    You can also choose UnPosted, Posted or All (all homeowners regardless of posting status) in the Show pane to change which homeowners are displayed. Once you post a homeowner’s new payment amount and that you sent them a letter, their status will remain Posted until you run the Initialize Escrow Data process again.
  4. You can change how the records are sorted by using the Order By pane.
    You can sort by Name, by Letter Number, or by Absolute % (the size of the adjustment, disregarding whether it is positive or negative).
  5. Adjust the actual name of the letter to be used for the selected homeowner by selecting the letter from the drop-down list in the Ltr. field.
    For more information about the available default letters, see the Affiliate Plan Tab section. 

    6. To learn how to create or customize merge letters, refer to the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section.

  6. Click the Include check box next to each homeowner you wish to select, or use the Include pane to Set All or Clear All Include check boxes.
    You can print letters and post adjustments to all homeowners whose Include boxes are checked.
To print and post the letters and adjustments

After you have checked the Include field (above) to indicate which homeowners you want to send letters and post adjustments for, you are ready to generate the letters.

  1. On the Escrow Payment Posting screen, click the Letters and Labels button.
    The Select Escrow Adjustment Documents screen appears.
  2. Select which letters you want to include in the letter generation by checking the Include box next to their name.
  3. Enter the Effective Date on which the adjustment will take effect.
    This date defaults to, and generally should remain, equal to the Effective Date used for the Escrow Analysis. Since the Effective Date is used in the Escrow Adjustment Letters, letters cannot be created if you leave this field blank.
  4. Click the Letters button.
    Keystone exports the necessary information to your  My Documents\MoreThanData\Exported Data.csv file, starts Word (if it is not already started), sends the selected documents to Word, and transfers you to Word. A separate Word merge document is created for each letter type you included in step 2.
  5. Return to Keystone and the Select Escrow Adjustment Documents screen (see step 1), then click the Labels or Envelopes button to generate the labels or envelopes for the selected documents in Word, if needed.
  6. Return to Keystone and the Select Escrow Adjustment Documents screen, then click the Post button to log the adjustment letters and to adjust escrow schedules for each homeowner's record.
    This enters the Effective Date and the new escrow payment amount into the Escrow History record of each homeowner for whom you generated a letter. If you would like to include a note as part of the posting, add the note to the Notes field in the Post pane prior to clicking the Post button.

    After clicking the Post button, you are asked to confirm that you want the corresponding adjustments to be made to the escrow schedule histories of the homeowners. 
  7. Click OK to confirm, or Cancel to leave the homeowners’ records unchanged.

Adjustments that result in refunds to homeowners and transfers of funds between escrow and principal are entered individually via the Mortgage/Payment Information screen. The Escrow Analysis Recommended Transfers report provides the data needed to record these adjustments.

Generally, when your affiliate writes a check to someone, you enter this as a disbursement on the Escrow Disbursement screen. If instead money is moved between accounts and no check is involved, you enter this as a non-standard $0 total payment entry on the Payments screen.

Therefore, if a homeowner has a surplus in their escrow account and your affiliate writes the homeowner a check for this surplus, this should be entered as a negative disbursement on the Escrow Disbursement screen. If instead, the surplus is applied to the homeowner’s principal, this should be entered on the Payments screen as a non-standard payment.

As a general rule, transactions that decrease the homeowner’s escrow balance are negative; those that increase the balance are positive.