Submitted By
Steven Drazner, CFO
Reviewed By
CLP
Agenda Item Title
Title
A Resolution Approving a Billing Services Agreement with Invoice Cloud, Inc. to Provide Electronic Utility Bill Presentment and Payment Services and Authorizing its Execution
End
Overview
Overview
When the Village went live with BS&A utility billing (water, sewer, refuse), the only available third party merchant processor which directly interacted in real time with BS&A for online payments was through the company Point & Pay (P&P). Unfortunately, staff has received several complaints from customers related to the P&P portal about the difficulty setting up recurring payments, especially for multi-account customers as well as general overall dissatisfaction with the P&P product. Staff agrees with those customers that the P&P system is rather inefficient and could use a great deal of improvement.
In effort to make the online bill paying system more user friendly, finance staff discussed the issue with BS&A and it was communicated that they now also use a competitor called Invoice Cloud which directly interacts with the BS&A utility billing database. Similar to P&P, Invoice Cloud, as denoted by its name, is a cloud based system and no sensitive credit card or other payment information would be directly stored on the Village's servers.
Body
Staff Recommendation
Approve attached agreement.
Fiscal Impact
The costs under both vendors is variable and based on the number or amounts of transactions paid online. A comparison follows:
Point &
Invoice
Pay
Cloud
Notes
Credit/Debit Card Fee
0.4% of amount
.75 per transaction
Breakeven transaction approx $190
Electronic Check
$0.65
$0.50
I-Cloud non-recurring $.75
Point & Pay credit/debit card transaction fees are based on the dollar amount of payment while Invoice Cloud charges a fixed $.75 per transaction, regardless of the amount. Therefore, the breakeven point is $190 where transactions below this threshold would cost less u...
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