City Water Bills

The Challenge

Customers pay their municipal water bills monthly. It’s expensive for cities to send paper bills, chase down late payments, or interrupt service for nonpayments. Payment dropboxes compromise customer information security and make it cumbersome for staff to manually process payments. Essential utilities like water should be easily accessible for everyone.

The Solution

Give customers easy, self-service options to pay their bills — whether they pay using cash or digital payments, and regardless of their ability to pay in one lump sum or a little throughout the payment period.

Payment kiosks provide walk-up or drive-through self-service options for people to pay their bills when it’s convenient for them. Kiosks can take cash, check, and card payments 24/7. It’s easy for customers to look up their current amount due and make a full or partial payment without incurring any added fees, so they can choose to pay a little throughout the month. Their payments post in real-time to avoid penalties.

Recurring automatic payments help customers stay current on their bill and make revenue collection more predictable for municipal utilities. To get started, customers can make a secure, mobile-friendly profile on their city’s website, link their utility account and store payment information, and turn autopay on. At any time, customers can change their billing method or other payment information, and view or cancel an upcoming payment. The technology leverages a real-time integration to your customer information system (CIS), so customers will be billed their current amount due on their billing due date.

CityBase Revenue Management allows your staff to research, review, and reconcile utility bill payments in a dashboard that centralizes online and in-person transactions.

For us to have that real-time integration and to see those payments real-time when we get to the month-end close, it’s such a faster process. Keeping the kiosk and the web platform together on one revenue management tool helps reconciliation that much more.

Tyler Douthit City Controller and Utilities CFO
City of Lawrence, IN
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