Fees and online payments
Agencies can use Citizen Access to collect fees that relate to records online. This feature enables public users to access their records, view the associated fees, group records together in a shopping cart, and pay for the fees in the cart from their computer. The implementation of online payment processing allows public users to use a credit card or a debit card to pay for the associated fees online. To set up online payment processing, contact Accela Customer Support or your Accela Delivery Team specialist.
You can also use fees and online payments to provide fee estimations on applications or licenses through partial applications. Fee estimation is useful when public users want to inform themselves of the estimated costs relating to a business license or a building permit.
In the case that your agency wants to offer estimations, but do not want online payment functionality, you can remove pay links from web pages so that during the application process, public users avoid the payment pages. Together, the fees and online payment functionality provides a way to become an online government merchant. The people whom you serve can easily manage their permits and business licenses and pay for the fees to your agency from home or office.
Note: To set up fees and online payments, refer to the questions and tasks in Set up fees. The questions help you assess which features you want to make available to the public.
For a comprehensive configuration list for fees and online payment functionality, see Set up fees and Fee items.
To implement a third-party payment processor, download the ePayments SDK Development Guide and the ePay SDK.zip file from Community. The ePay SDK.zip file includes all of the scripts and web services needed for configuring payment adapters.
When public users pay for record fees online, the payment processing service fees vary depending on what module the records come from and what payment gateway your agency is using. You can assign one service fee structure for each module by configuring the PAYMENT_GROUP standard choice in Civic Platform. This standard choice provides the flexibility to use one service fee structure for one module and to use another service fee structure for another module. For information on configuring the standard choice, refer to the Accela Civic Platform Configuration Reference.