Thanks - all good information. As a followup, I want to expand a bit on how we currently bill customers as I'm thinking there may be further complications to 'some' of our customers. Presuming that 90% of all our customers pay timely, this option would work just fine. Currently, we send an actual statement each quarter, rather than the invoice. The reason is that if a customer doesn't pay an invoice timely, we add a finance charge. On the next statement printed, it will show the outstanding invoice line (presuming they still haven't paid it), the finance charge line and 'new' invoice line all on the statement. There could be several quarters worth of service charges and a finance charges on the statement. Based on what I'm gleaning from the payment services info, it seems like the only option is for them to pay from an actual 'current' invoice and not from a statement? So internally, we would need to then send an invoice for the finance charge, an invoice for the new quarterly charge and then how do we let them know that there is still an outstanding invoice? Would we then be required to send a separate statement in order to get them the information? We are a government entity(utility) so if at the end of the of the year they have not paid any portion of their bill for that year, that amount gets turned over to the local taxing authority for inclusion on the property owners real estate tax bill - YEAH Wisconsin for allowing us to do this! But this also means that every quarter, I have to send a "statement" showing the full amount owed by the customers and I'm thinking then that their only option to pay would be by check and not through the automated payment service - Am I thinking of this correctly? I know we won't get 100% participation in payment services but need to figure out how this service will help and/or change our internal processing.
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