Online payments are a massive time saver for you and your residents—not to mention, 77% of households surveyed say they prefer to pay their bills online. When they do, you eliminate busy work like opening and tracking mail, trips to the bank, and entering payments into your accounting ledgers.
Once you’ve had a bank account approved for online payments in Buildium, you’re just a few steps away from having your residents pay rent and fees online. Here are three steps that will get you on your way.
Step 1: Enable your properties
First, you’ll want to enable online payments for all the properties that you’d like to accept ePay on. Just go to the banking page in your account (Accounting > Banking) and then click into a bank account that is ePay enabled. From there, click on the properties tab.
There, you’ll notice that these properties are not yet enabled for ePay (they’ll have an “x” in the “EFT/eCheck” and “Credit card” columns). Click on “Edit ePay methods.”
Once there, select all the properties associated with that account (or if you prefer, select properties individually).
Step 2: Give residents access to the resident website
Once you’ve enabled properties, you’ll want to grant access to your tenants and association owners to your resident site.
To do this, go to the resident’s or homeowner’s page, then click on “Create account.” From here you can resend an invite to a resident who hasn’t set up their account yet. Or, invite a bunch of residents to the tenant website on the “Resident site users” page.
From here, just click on the “Manage multiple accounts” button, then filter your users and select the ones you want to communicate with, and send them all an email simultaneously.
Once you’ve set your residents up to pay online, you can sign in to their resident site to help them make their first payments. You can do this right from the tenant or association owners page by clicking on, “Sign in as user.”
Once residents have logged into the tenant website, they’ll be able to easily pay their rent and fees from a computer or mobile device.
Step 3: Show your residents how easy paying online is
Once you’ve invited residents to use the tenant website, simply send them a link to this instructional page so that they can see just how easy it is to pay rent online: https://www.buildium.com/how-to-pay-rent-and-fees-online/
Or better yet, show them how to “set it and forget it” with a recurring EFT payment through the resident portal: https://www.buildium.com/setting-up-recurring-payments/
And there you have it: three simple steps that will save you time, frustration and late payments for years to come.
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