GAR - Integration-Driven Automation

GAR - Integration-Driven Automation

GAR - Integration-Driven Automation

Every garnishment raises the same three questions:
  1. Is the person named on the order a customer?
  2. If so, what accounts do they have?
  3. What do we do with the money in them?

Normally a processor answers all three by hand — searching the core system, reading the results, and entering what they find into Safari. Integration-driven automation means Safari asks your core system these questions directly.

The person or business named on a garnishment order is called a subject. A Subject Search asks your core system whether that subject is a customer. When a garnishment arrives electronically, Safari runs this search automatically for you. The result appears next to each subject's name: a match, no match, or a possible match needing your review.

Finding The Accounts: Account Lookup

If a subject matches a customer, Safari automatically runs an Account Lookup to pull that customer's accounts, including balances, ownership, account location, and recent ACH deposits. Every account found is gathered into a single Account List on the matter, so you review one list rather than several reports. The original reports stay on the Searches tab if you ever need them.

Deciding What to Seize: The Account Review Worksheet

The Account Review Worksheet is where you make decisions. It shows every account on one screen with the balance, exemptions, offsets, processing fee, and the amount you're seizing — and it does the arithmetic as you go. Two things you'll do most often:

  • Exclude accounts you're not touching. They move to the bottom of the list and grey out, so it stays obvious you've already dealt with them.
  • Enter a seized amount on the accounts you are touching. Compliance fields like account location and exemptions only become required once you enter an amount, so accounts you're skipping won't block you.

Moving The Money: Transactions

When you save, Safari sends the instruction to your core system and records it as a transaction — placing a hold, seizing funds, paying a fee, reversing an entry, or releasing a hold. Whether seizing funds moves them to a general ledger account or holds them in the customer's own account depends on how your institution is set up. Either way, the transaction is labelled so you can see which happened.

When No Decision is Needed: No Touch Levies™

Sometimes the searches can answer the garnishment for you. If the subject isn't a customer, has no accounts, or has only closed accounts, there is nothing to seize and nothing to decide. In those cases, No Touch Levies™ finishes the matter by itself — closing it and sending the agency the correct answer, with no manual work at all.

This applies only to garnishments received electronically from a registered agency. It has to be switched on for your company, for each of the three answers separately, and for the matter subtype — so you control exactly how much runs unattended. You can also set a dollar ceiling per subtype, above which levies always come to a person regardless of what the searches return.

Is there a question we haven't answered? Please send it to us at support@safarilaw.com