Basic way to pay by Credit/Debit online
Now that we have close to 500 homes we serve, we are bumping into the reality that many people prefer to run all their expenses through their credit cards. I don’t like to have money taken from my accounts automatically. Call me crusty, I can take it. I have been working on an e-billing solution.
We hired a merchant processing consultant. We hired a quickbooks integration consultant. We got a merchant deposit account with Bank Of America (try to do that and not use their merchant services, lots of fun there)
The big day came to have the integrators install the software on our billing computer.
Well, 20 minutes into it, the technician told us “We cannot proceed, you are using an unsupported operating system, Windows 7” My response was, “Well, Windows 10 is not trusted by us as Microsoft pushes updates for Windows 10 that may render the system unusable”. We got to a standoff, I blinked. I have to buy a new computer system (Windows 10), and install a whole new suite of software (and licenses) just so this one function works. The first system I bought was well, too cheap. I thought to myself, “How much CPU do I really need just to run quickbooks, web browser, email, excel?” Turns out, quite a bit more than I thought. Janet was ready to rip my head off for making her system so damn slow.
In the interim, I have added a “quick pay” link on our website. This is just a simple way where you can fill out a form to pay your invoice. Think of it as writing a check online. There is nothing “automatic” about it other than the money is transferred from your account to ours. We use Authorize.net and everything has full PCI compliance.
This isn’t my final solution for electronic payment, but it is a better than absolutely nothing other than Zelle.
If you use this quick pay, please consider adding $1.50 to the fee to help offset the expense that I will incur to receive your payment through this method. For the 100mbit service option, this $1.50 is about 50% of our profit on your monthly fee, the rest goes to KPUD and WA department of revenue.