Our first big payment day on the new system

Today we ran our first full billing cycle for autopay. We ran 574 Credit cards + e-checks with only 7 cards declined. That is a small miracle. The new system proactively updates card data at the first of the month and then Ruby hunts you down if there is an unresolvable issue with the card on file.

We learned a lot about e-check processing, the hard way. Apparently there are “payment gateways” and “network interchanges”. When we first setup the new profile for Net253 in November 2023, we used a $5,000 per month limit (this is about 50 checks). We ran 57 e-checks today, all sorts of alarms went off as out monthly transaction limit of $5,000 was blown in a few seconds as we posted $8,000 in charges via e-check for 57 accounts.

The sad thing is we saw this coming. Over a month ago we went through a full underwriting review with the Federal Clearing House underwriters. We had to share 3 contiguous months of all our bank accounts and answer any questions they had. We were approved for a rolling window of $30,000 per week. 2 of the 3 entities involved updated their “limits”, but the gateway processor did not.

Please if you read this far, if you are using your banks bill pay, stop. Please log in and sign up on our system, or call the main number and Ruby will get the e-check/card information from you. When we run e-check/cards, your funds are automatically credited to your account. We eat all the finance charges; we do not pass a “convenience fee” on to you for e-check or credit cards. If you use paper checks or bill pay service it is your responsibility to check every month that the payment matches the invoice. If we do a service call, or if KPUD raises their rates, it is up to you to notice and correct the “recurring payment”

We would really like to get rid of the 400+ paper checks that come in each month. That is a lot of manual data entry.