The Benefits of Accepting Online Payments for Property Management Companies
The majority of renters and home owners still send in their monthly payments via paper-check. It's a tried-and-true payment method that works. However, this approach has several drawbacks — both for the payee and the recipient.
When sending in rent or mortgage payments via check, the payee must:
- Find stamps and envelopes.
- Make trips to the post office or the property managers office.
- Spend time writing the checks.
- Make sure the check arrives on time to avoid additional late fees.
Plus, they must have the presence of mind to follow these steps every month like clockwork. As you can imagine, delinquencies are very common in the world of commercial and residential real estate.
In many ways, the recipient is even worse off.
Each incoming check needs to be processed, deposited and recorded — often by hand. According to some estimates, paper-checks cost recipients anywhere from $4 to $20 per payment — once you factor in hidden expenses like:
- Materials (e.g., ink, paper, equipment).
- Employee hours spent handling each check.
- Daily, weekly or monthly trips to the bank.
Those costs start to add up as your portfolio of managed properties continues to grow.
Using an online payment portal can help eliminate these expenses and deliver a host of important benefits.
Benefits Of An Online Payment Portal
An online payment portal works very similar to a traditional e-commerce shopping cart — payees complete their monthly payment from the comfort of their PC browser or mobile phone via the customer payment portal.
The primary advantages behind this approach are less cost and more convenience.
Because payments happen electronically without requiring human intervention, your office doesn’t have to invest as much time handling and processing each incoming payment. This will free-up valuable resources for more important activities such as marketing your services.
Additional benefits of having an online payment portal:
- The ability to collect payments 24/7. This can dramatically reduce the frequency of delinquent payments.
- Faster account settlements. All payments happen instantaneously, eliminating processing delays and unpredictable cash flow.
- Enhanced payment security. You don’t have to worry about checks getting lost in the mail.
- Customizable recurring billing. Set it and forget it billing schedules let you select the frequency, payment date, and amount to be debited from your account
- Greater convenience. Your users can handle their payments while on the go — no matter where they are.
Which Online Payment Portal Should You Use?
Arguably the most important element is fraud protection. You want a payment processor that follows the latest data security standards. Otherwise, your clients' financial information could become compromised.
In addition to PCI-Compliant data protection, we offer a range of fraud management tools to help safeguard your users' payment information from end to end.
Lastly, you want a payment portal that is easy to use. By this, we mean choosing a solution that minimizes the amount of time and effort required to manage incoming payments.
We offer multiple online solutions that make payment collection as easy as possible, including:
- Scheduled reminders that instantly alert clients to upcoming payments.
- Recurring billing that automatically deducts funds every month.
- Payment modules that seamlessly integrate all transactions with the accounting, bookkeeping and CRM platforms that your team already uses.
Most importantly, our online solutions allow you to accept a diverse range of payment options from debit and credit cards to ACH and e-checks.
To learn more about setting up an online payment portal for your property management company, just follow the link below:
Visit us online at www.TailoredTransactions.com or call us direct at (888) 669.1686