Background
Prior to this release and within the landlord function for Capita, we already the ability for a landlord to:
- authenticate themselves using their creditor reference and some other information IF they were not a large HA
- retrieve letters for their creditor reference
- retrieve payment schedules for their creditor reference
What this meant in practice is that a landlord could have multiple creditor references associated to a single OneVu account. Also that a landlord could see the letters and schedules associated with that reference. However, having a big list of letters/schedules to view did not enable a simple way to know things in the context of a specific claimant.
I.e. What is the weekly award of HB for Claimant X? Which letters have been sent specific to that claimant? Which payments have been made specific to a claimant.
This release
This release provides two significant upgrades:
- The ability for a landlord to authenticate themselves irrespective of size
- The ability for a landlord, particularly HAs, to perform tenant queries
We will now go into detail on each of these new functions.
1) New authentication mechanism
All users wishing to see sensitive data, i.e. council tax, benefits, landlords need to go through a one off authentication process.
This was limited, until now, to small landlords because the performance of the GetPaymentDetails API Capita provide was too slow when trying to retrieve details for a HA.
For this version, we've taken a different approach to the design of the authentication that works in a way that we can authenticate a landlord, irrespective of their size in real time.
The questions a landlord needs to answer in order to access their landlord account are shown below:
I.e. they need to provide the claim reference for a tenant they receive payments for, that tenant's surname and their own creditor/payment reference. By asking them for to provide these answers we simultaneously are able to authenticate any landlord and do it quicker than before.
Once authenticated a landlord, in this new set up will be able to:
- Do a new tenant query
- View their payment schedules exactly as before
- View letters by claim
I.e. rather than a huge list of every letter ever sent a landlord has a more functional mechanism which is to search for the claim they need to see the letter(s) for.
In order to see letters/payment schedules these must have been set up to be automatically imported or be available on a local network drive to be retrieved.
2) New tenant query
As mentioned, once authenticated, it is now possible for a landlord to perform a search for a tenant they have a query about.
This is shown here:
We can also see that it shows the user the 'Creditor' reference being viewed. This is important as a user could link multiple creditors to the one OneVu account.
The reason why we HAVE to provide the functionality to view a single claim like this is two fold:
- A landlord accesses the portal to answer a query or queries for specific claimants
- We need to confirm a landlord is still able to view a claim's details in real time
That is to say, for point b), we need to know categorically that that landlord still has the right to view a claimant's details. I.e. that they are the payee.
When a query is done, our code checks:
a) Whether they are the current payee
b) Whether they were a payee
In the following example, the landlord is the current payee for the tenant shown:
As one can see for each claimant in this situation, there is the ability to see the:
- Property it relates to
- Current weekly housing benefit award
- Next payment amount
- Benefit cap in place (this is a simple Yes/No)
- Currently Suspended (this is a simple Yes/No)
- Payments and Document buttons
The way the design has been done, we can technically show anything that is possible to show the claimant. So if you feel there is other information that would be of use please let us know. In the first instance send these to:
john.mcmahon@ieg4.com
Payments and Documents
In the above screenshot we can see a list of payments on the right. This is because the 'Payments' button was clicked after the claimant's details were loaded. I.e. this will show a list of all payments made to the customer historically.
The same is also true for documents. I.e. if the Documents button is clicked it will provide a list of documents issued for that claimant to the landlord.
Three points of note
1) Performance
Whilst carrying out testing on a site, we have identified several areas where performance can be improved. We expect to issue an update to this before the end of July.
2) Payment Schedules
Note that, as payment schedules are not specific to a claim these will work as they did previously.
3) Landlord Name
We will also add the Landlord's name beside the creditor id before the end of July.