Let's take a look at payments.

Historically in property management, occupants paid their rent and fees by giving you a written check or a money order. In the modern era, they want to be able to pay online: either with a credit card, or with an electronic check. Harmony makes this easy, and it's not just limited to occupants like tenants, guests, and association members; you can also have owners fund their setup costs, fund a shortfall for a large expense, or make up a reserve shortage, with a credit card or online bank transaction.

You aren't required to integrate online payments in order to use Harmony. You can still collect payments the old way, or you can use a non-integrated payment system. These add to your workload, though, and Harmony is all about bringing efficiency to your business. To make your life easy, it makes a ton of sense to integrate online payments.

The first step in getting Harmony payments off the ground is to choose your integrated payment processor. Harmony doesn't lock you in to one payment processor, rather, you have your choice of processors. The best option will vary by your business. Do you have a high existing online processing volume, or are you new to online payment processing? Do you have a good business and credit history, or are you less established? What are your needs regarding the speed a payment is settled? Do you want to have occupants and owners preauthorize a payment method so you can charge them at your convenience, or do you want all transactions to be initiated by the payer or preapproved? All of these are options to consider, and we have guides available to help you make the best choice. You can even start with one processor, and change down the road as you develop more history.

In Harmony, selecting your integrated payment processor is easy. Go to Settings, Money, Preferences, and select from the list for "System To Use For Receiving Online Payments" Harmony will provide the next steps for getting your integrated business account set up with this processor. Each processor is different, but they'll usually require things like your legal business name, EIN, and the bank acccount where you want funds deposited. For processors where you have your own distinct merchant account, there will be an additional process when an application is submitted and an underwriter will review it. This option requires more information, and a waiting period while everything is reviewed and approved, but in exchange you get better rates, more protection, and more features. For processors where you don't have a distinct merchant account, setup is typically almost instant.

Once your integrated payment account setup is complete, you'll either be given an account ID or credentials to fill in, or Harmony will fill these in automatically, depending on the processor. Some processors have additional options you can set, like your fraud protection level and when payments are settled. The help tips on these options will guide you through.

There are numerous other configuration options, but it doesn't need to be overwhelming. The help tips, and your Harmony onboarding or support representative, can guide you through. We'll cover a few options here, but they might not make perfect sense yet. Keep going, and it will all become crystal clear!

It's important to understand the nature of fees related to payments. Every payment you receive online has a fee associated with it. In Harmony, we call this the, "Transaction Fee". For standard accounts, Harmony doesn't charge you for receiving payments, but someone does. All the costs of receiving a payment are rolled up into one fee charged by the payment processor, and either billed to you, or deducted from your payment account, depending on the processor and your account type.

You can handle these fees in a number of ways, but they basically fall into three groupings: a) You can absorb these fees as a company expense; b) You can have your owners pay these fees, which usually requires disclosure in your management agreement; or c) You can add a "Convenience Fee" to each payment, which can have the result of offsetting your transaction fees.

The net of transaction fees and convenience fees is what Harmony calls your "Processing Fee", which can either be an income or an expense, either to you or your owner, based on your configuration. An example may be in order: Let's say you receive a credit card payment of $2000, and your processor charges a transaction fee of 2.9% plus 25 cents. When you add a convenience fee of 3%, the payer pays a total of $2060. Your transaction fee is $59.99. Since your convenience fee is $60, you have a net processing fee income of one penny on this transaction. If, on the other hand, you did not charge a convenience fee at all, you would have a net processing fee of $59.99, which you would either absorb or pass along to your owner, depending on your configuration.

Harmony is unique in that it ensures trust accounting compliance for online payments, regardless of transaction, convenience, or processing fees. You don't have to do any of the calculations or make any adjustments, Harmony covers all this. In the back-end Harmony splits out the payment into four components (other software only splits into two) and tracks them all for you.

We've already covered how Harmony tracks the transaction and convenience fees in order to calculate a processing fee. But the magic number is what Harmony calls the "Post Amount". This is the original amount that the person paid in order to satisfy their obligation. In the above example, let's say the two thousand dollar payment was for a tenant's rent. When the tenant makes full payment for their rent obligation, you are expected to have $2000 received into your trust account. This $2000 is not affected by any other fees, it's what the tenant paid, and what you need to record as income to the owner, and indicate your tenant has fully paid this obligation.

Other solutions handle this in a variety of ways that require your manual input, often with a mish-mash of adjustments and additions. But Harmony makes it super-simple. As long as you've configured things, when you receive this payment, Harmony automatically breaks it out to put all components in the right place and ensure that your accounting is clean and accurate.

Now that we understand all that, it's time to enter our transaction fees and convenience fees into our configuration.

If your selected integrated payment processor has standard transaction fees for HERO members, these will display and can be applied by selecting the indicated option. If you have negotiated a special rate, or if your processor does not have standard rates, enter these amounts based on what your processor gives you.

When it comes to convenience fees, understand that their are laws around how you may implement these, and these laws vary by your location. In general, these laws cover two areas: disclosure and alternate channel. Harmony complies with all known disclosure laws by showing convenience fees clearly and distinctly whenever they will change a payment amount. On the alternate channel regulation, it's up to you to comply. Check with your attorney, but basically this means that you cannot require payment to be made via a channel that includes a convenience fee. In other words, if online is the only way you allow people to pay you, you probably cannot have a convenience fee for online payments. You must provide an offline method for people to pay you, in order for your online payments to be considered an, "alternate channel". This is not limited to Harmony or to property management, it's across the board.

Besides being clear, it's important that your convenience fees are consistent. In Harmony, you can set a convenience fee by payment type and payer type. For example, you can say, "All tenants pay a convenience fee of 3% for all card payments." But you cannot say, "My tenant Frank the Frog makes me really angry, I want to charge him, and him alone, a 6% convenience fee." If you have a case like this, you shouldn't, and can't, deal with it as a convenience fee increase. Instead, we can show you how to add a P.I.T.A. fee, and disclose it in your leases.

One last note on convenience fees. They cannot be a profit center for your business. That's asking for trouble. There are a lot of ways to get rich in property management, but "making bank" on your payment convenience fees should not be one of them.

Let's select Done, then make a quick side trip.

All of the settings we've configured so far cover the essentials and include everyone you have an agreement with. Now, tenants can pay on their lease agreements, guests on their reservation agreements, association members on their membership agreements, and owners on their management agreements. But there's a group of people from whom you may wish to accept payments, where you don't have an agreement. These are your rental applicants or vacation bookers. If you want to accept payments from these people, take a quick trip over to Applications and-or Bookings to set your options there.

Most of your payments are going to come from either portals, or from login-less links you send. While you can collect preapproved or preauthorized payments directly in Harmony, you can only do so after a person has authorized this in their portals, so we'll start there.

Most of your payments are going to come from either your portals, or from "log inless links" you send. While you can collect preapproved or preauthorized payments directly in Harmony, you can only do so after a person has authorized this in their portals, so we'll start there.

For the purposes of this demonstration, we'll look at a tenant paying rent. The first step is to make sure they have portal access, and that payments are included in their portal. Start by selecting Tenants, in Management.

From our tenant list, we can see which tenant's have a portal connected, and which ones are waiting for an invitation to sign up. There are additional resources elsewhere that cover portals in depth. For now, we're going to assume you understand portals, setup invites and templates, and bulk configuration of portal options. 

We'll select a tenant; this one already has his portal set up.

From the tenant's profile view, select the Portal menu icon.

Here we see this tenant has portal access, and has Money and Payments enabled. This means they're all set up to make a payment - there's nothing else to do. You can set up all tenants at once in your configuration, or set them up individually in their portal view, but, again, this is covered elsewhere, in portal help resources.

If there were some reason to block this tenant from making a payment on their portal, like an eviction in process, you can select to Block Portal Payments in their Prohibition. Note that if you do not block them, and they do make a payment, but you choose not to accept it, you can still void and refund the payment before it's posted to their account. We'll cover this later. Also note that if you wish to block all tenants from making payments after a certain day in the month, you can set this in your configuration. 

When the tenant logs into their portal and selects the Money and Payments option, they'll see their money and payment overview. Note that this is configurable by you, and you can also allow them to see a "tenant statement" in their portal. Not to sound like a broken record, but working with portals and portal configuration is covered elsewhere, and outside of the scope of this payments video.

When the tenant selects "One-time Payment", they can proceed to submit payment. In this case, you've configured to allow the tenant to pay less than the full amount due, so they can edit the amount they wish to pay. Your account also includes both card payments and bank/ACH payments, so the tenant sees both options. Your selected payment processor supports Harmony's "Portal Wallet" function, so the tenant can "save" payment methods rather than having to re-enter them each time. Note that some processors include advanced portal wallet functionality, including automatically updating the wallet when a card is replaced due to being lost or stolen, or expired. 

Once the payment is submitted, the tenant sees a confirmation message. They can go to their Portal Payment History any time to see a record, and the status of any payment made. In Harmony, you get an alert that a payment was submitted, and this also shows in your Updates and Alerts. We'll come back to this in a minute; but first, let's cover the other things a tenant can do.

Often a tenant will want automatically recurring payments, to avoid the requirement to log in each month to pay their rent. Or, you might provide tenants an incentive to set up preapprove periodic payments on their lease. In their portal, it's easy for a tenant to set up a preapproved payment plan.

When setting up a preapproved payment plan, the tenant must have a payment method saved in their portal wallet. If they do not, their portal will provide them instructions to do so. Typically, they'll validate this payment method by paying their current charges due, or, if they have no amount due, paying $1. 

Once they have a valid payment method saved, they'll configure their plan. It's really simple. They choose whether their payment amount and number of payments are restricted to their rent amount, and lease duration, or if they want an open-ended plan where any amount due can be collected over any time period, until their lease ends. 

For example, let's say you have a tenant one thousand two hundred and ten dollar monthly rent on a 12 month lease. The tenant says, "I want you to charge my credit card for rent at the beginning of each month". The minimum amount they can select to authorize is the total of: rent, plus the optional preapproval buffer you set (for late fees or other incidental charges), plus the convenience fee. 

The minimum number of payments to authorize is 12, because they have 12 months left on their lease. 

However, the tenant can choose, at their discretion, to allow any amount. This is convenient if you are charging the tenant for electric or water bills, where their monthly bill is highly variable. The tenant can also choose to allow any number of payments, rather than 12. This is convenient if their lease will renew month-to-month. 

If something changes, like there is a rent increase, or the lease renews, the tenant can easily update their preapproval plan, or set up a new plan.

Preapproved plans create a high level of confidence for both the tenant and the property manager. They are low risk, and high reward, making rent payment and collection quick and easy. We could fill a book with horror stories from both property managers and tenants when they chose an inferior method of automating rent collection - but we'll spare you the gore.

There's one level above preapproved plans. It involves more risk for the property manager, with a higher number of chargebacks or disputed transactions. Not all integrated payment processors support it. However, when a property manager needs it, and a processor allows it, the preauthorized payment method enables  you to collect any amount, any time, from any preauthorized method.

Let's say you have an owner who is getting deployed on a Navy submarine. You know that if an emergency repair must be done on his managed house that exceeds his reserve, you may be in a pickle. You might have set up an arrangement where repairs exceeding a limit can be approved by his mother, when he's unreachable. But he doesn't want mom to pay for the repairs, and you don't want to loan him the money from your management funds. In such a case, you can ask the owner to set up his credit card or bank account as a preauthorized payment method for any approved repairs. When you have a five hundred dollar plumbing bill due immediately, and a three hundred dollar reserve, you can simply charge his card the $200 so he doesn't go negative.

To preauthorize a payment method, this owner will visit their portal, select Money and Payments, and select Manage beside the payment method. Note that they must have made at least one successful payment with this method, and selected to save it, to see it under saved accounts. From the authorization, they'll select, "Let me or my property manager use this for any charges." When they select save, it will be registered as a preauthorized method for you, and you'll see this in Harmony. We'll look at that in a minute, when we get to processing payments.

There's one more way your occupants and owners can pay online, before we get into what you do on your end. This is with, "log-inless links" for payments. This type of link, which can be sent with any charge or bill notification, allows the recipient to click the link and pay the charge, without logging in to their portal. It's handy for one-off charges above regular rent, or an owner paying you back if you had to lend them money to keep their account positive.

To add "log-inless links" to your message notifications for charges and bills, in Harmony, select Settings, then Messages and Letters, then System Message and Letter Templets. Choose the template to edit, in this case we'll edit charges for occupants. 

Select the place in your templet where you want to add the link, and select, "Payment Link" from the merge fields, then Save. Note that if you're not familiar with editing templets yet, this might be a good time to look at help resources for understanding and managing templets. That's beyond the scope of this video, but is helpful as you configure and use Harmony.

When you create a charge, and the option to send it as a message is enabled, the recipient will get an email or text message with the link. Clicking this link takes them to the one time payment page, where they can make payment. As this is a payment without a login, a digital fingerprint is automatically used. Note that your one time payment page is integrated with your website - when you have a HERO Website and have a website portal page configured.

No matter how an online payment is made, in Harmony, you'll have something called a, "Pay In". It's worth taking a moment to understand pay ins.

A pay in is a digital representation of a payment submitted. Think of it like the online equivalent of a paper check. When you have a paper check, you have an instrument that "represents" a payment, but you may or may not have any money yet. That depends on what happens next with the check. At the moment you receive a pay in, it simply represents that a payment has been submitted. The pay in's status shows you whether it's real money, or working its way through the process. You may wonder why this matters, and it may not. But as a property manager, you are likely bound to regulations concerning how you handle payments. It's important to understand the built-in features of Harmony that help you stay in compliance with all regulations, and give you the processing flexibility to accommodate your own policies, procedures, and preferences. 

This will all make more sense as we go through things.

When you receive a pay in, you'll get an alert in Harmony, and it will display in your updates and alerts. Just like with pay outs, pay ins can be viewed in contexts: either all pay ins for the company, which we call your global list; or only the pay ins for one person, which we call the individual list. Regardless of how you view it, a pay in displays the same information. However, there are distinctions in processing. We'll get to those in just a moment.

First, let's talk about the status of a pay in, and what that means to broker control of funds, and actual access to funds.

Initially, each pay in has a status that represents it has been submitted. The piggy bank icon starts brown, and stays brown until the funds have been confirmed in some manner. Integrated processors may have different names for the status of a transaction, in their system. Harmony uses a consistent representation of icons and colors across all integrated payment systems, but the names are kept in line with the processor's names - so you can match up a pay in within Harmony, to a transaction in the processor's portal, when you need their assistance.

After "submitted", a pay in's status switches to something that indicates it's moving through the process. This might be, "approved", "accepted", "succeeded", depending on the processor, and there can be numerous levels. You can ignore this, it makes no functional difference to you - although you may find it interesting. The piggy bank is still brown, and that's really what matters. You don't have any money yet, although, like with a written check, you have an instrument that represents money has been authorized. 

During the time you don't actually control the funds, the pay in will show a "Pending" icon. If you are legally obligated, or prefer to wait until funds are in your account, this is your indicator to hold off on posting this pay in as a receipt. If you're not required to wait, or just don't want to wait, you can view this pay in and select the option to mark it as cleared so that you can process it. If you always want to handle pay ins this way, just set your selection in Settings, Money, Preferences, Treat Online Payments As Available Funds Upon Successful Submission.

Once a pay in has cleared, either by the automated process, your configuration setting, or manually marking it as cleared, the status icon turns green. It now has a status name that indicates it's ready to go, like, "Processed", "Settled", or "Completed". You can proceed to post this payment as a receipt to the person's account.

Before we do this, let's look at two other status families.

The first is, "Manual". This is represented by a black status icon. A manual status means you recorded this pay in manually, and it's not going to go through any automated status changes. It's up to you to know the specifics. If you're batch recording checks as pay ins, for example, these will have a status of "Manual". Your internal process will dictate when they're ready to be processed as receipts. For example, you may have your data entry person batch the checks received in the mail. When they place all these checks in an envelope and deliver it to the bookeeper's desk, this may be your cue that they're ready to process into receipts.

The second is, "Failed". This is rare, but there are cases where a transaction can fail at the processor, either because of some technical glitch, or because of something that happened with the payer or payment method, between the time the payment was submitted and it completed. In such a case, you'll see a red status icon, and you should examine the details of the pay in for more information.

To see the details, select the "View Pay In Details" icon. There are a ton of details and descriptions here. Items whose meaning is not immediately obvious include helpful descriptions below. In many cases, your integrated payment processor may offer their own transaction portal, where you can view these same details, and sometimes, even more detailed information. For some processors, you can query their system for a instant lookup by selecting the submitted payment digital fingerprint bar.

We've covered a lot of information. If it feels like too much, don't worry. You probably won't need most of it, but it's helpful to have it for reference whenever something doesn't look quite right. Let's move on to the next step, receiving a pay in into a person's account.

As mentioned previously, a pay in is a digital representation of a payment submitted, much like a written check is a physical representation of a payment submitted. Once your pay in is ready, it's time to post a receipt to the payer's account, to show that they've paid their charges, and move the money into your accounting records. We call this process, "Receiving a Pay In".

You can receive a pay in two different ways: either from the individual's money view, or from your global pay in list. When receiving pay ins from your global list, they are processed automatically according to your company rules and configuration. You can see how any pay in will be allocated by selecting the Show Allocation Details icon. This shows the payer's outstanding charges, if any, and how the payment will be automatically allocated in the receipt. If the payment is greater than the amount of outstanding charges, it shows how the overpayment will be handled. At the bottom, it shows how the processing fee will be handled. Again, this is based on your configuration and settings, including things like charge dates and priority to pay. If you need to do something other than what's predetermined by your business rules, don't worry. You can skip processing this pay in from your global view, and process it individually from the tenant's Money View - where you have complete manual control over how the payment is allocated. For most property managers, they process everything that's, "normal", from their global view, then handle individual exceptions from the individual view.

To begin processing from your global view, select the, "Receive Pay Ins", action icon. Each pay in eligible for processing will be checked and highlighted. To skip one, uncheck it. To skip all and manually check only those you wish to process, start by selecting the Uncheck All icon. Once you've checked each pay in you wish to process, select the Receive Pay Ins button to create a receipt for this payment in the individual's account. As individual receipts are created, the checkbox switches to a green checkmark. When they're all done, the overall status updates.

There are cases where you cannot, or should not, process a pay in, or where it seems it would be better processing from the individual's view. We'll explore a few of these.

The, "Not Allowed" icon indicates a pay in where a manual choice must be made in order to process it. In such a case, hover over the icon to view the explanation. Typically these can be processed from the individual view, where you can manually make that choice.

The, "Alert" icon indicates there's something unusual about the transaction that warrants further exploration before processing. In this case, we have a pay in including payments for deposits - as indicated when we hover over the icon. Since you might want to deposit this into a security deposit bank account, rather than the default bank account, Harmony is alerting you. If you want to be able to select an alternate bank account for the receipt, process this individually. If you are receiving all money into the default account and transferring it into the security deposit bank account later, you can process it normally.

The, "Void" icon gives you the opportunity to void this pay in before you create a receipt. You might do this if: it's an accidental duplicate, (although there's some degree of protection for this in the portals); a payment you didn't want, (like a partial payment from a tenant where you've filed an eviction); a reported error, (like when a tenant calls you and says, "I accidentally paid you ten thousand dollars and I meant to pay one thousand!). Selecting the void icon provides additional guidance before the pay in is actually voided, which can vary by the type of payment and integrated processor. In most cases, the back-end processing of a void is done automatically. If the transaction has already cleared, it will be refunded, while if it's still in process, it will be cancelled.

So far we've covered the ways a person you serve, like a tenant, guest, association member, or owner, can create a pay in, and how to process them. This may be all you ever do. However, we need to look at two other ways that you can create pay ins. Preapproved Pay Ins, and Manual Pay Ins.

Preapproved pay ins are created when an occupant has a preapproved plan, and it's time to collect their money. This is a quick two step process. First, you collect the money from their designated payment method, which creates a pay in, then, you receive the pay in. We've already covered receiving the pay in - the second part - so now let's look at the first part.

Select the, "View & Collect Preapproved Payments" icon from your global pay ins view. All preapproved plans display, with information about the plan. Just like with pay ins, you can view expanded information for any plan by selecting the View Details icon, or you can switch to Detail View by selecting the Summary View/Detail view toggle icon.

Each plan shows the occupant's agreement and occupant information, along with the dates, payor/method, authorization status, authorized amount, balance due, and amount to process. Select the, "Collect Preapproved Payments" action icon to select and process preapproved payments. Just like with pay ins, all eligible payments will be checked and highlighted, but you can uncheck individual payments, or uncheck all.

Payments with an alert or warning contain information to review. Hover over the icon, or click or tap it, for details. In this case, we have a tenant who owes way more than their preapproved plan allows. There's guidance to resolve this. This tenant is also vacating, which might warrant further investigation. You'll likely want to see if you are holding prepaid rent, or if you've charged a lease-break fee, before you run ahead and collect this payment. This is subject to your individual policies and procedures...the system is just warning you that you might want to dig deeper now, to avoid a headache later.

Once you're ready to collect the payments, select the Collect Payments icon. As payments are collected, the checkbox will turn into a green checkmark. Confirmation displays when they're all processed. Select View Pay Ins to switch to your pay in view and see these newly added pay ins.

At this point, it's just as though the occupant had submitted payment through their portal. You have a submitted pay in, which will then go through the various processing stages. When this is ready for you to receive into their account, you'll see the green status and will be able to process it just like any other pay in.

The other method by which you, as the property manager, can collect payments is by adding them manually. You can add a manual pay in from an individual's money view, in the options drop down...or in the global view, with the, "Add" icon. Most likely, you'll find you use these for different purposes. 

Individually added pay ins are typically used when, either: you do not use an integrated payment processor, but still wish to record pay ins with tracking for transaction and convenience fees; or you have people with preauthorized payment methods, and you need to manually collect. 

Pay ins manually added from the global pay in view are typically used when, either: you have a two person or two step process to record payments for internal compliance, where one person records the payment, and a separate person finalizes the payments as receipts after your internal review process; or when you want to record a big pile of payments rapidly, like when the big bag of rent checks arrives on the first of the month.

Let's say we have a pile of rent checks on our desk. We want to quickly record all of these, without worrying about their charge allocations for now. Select the Add icon, then find the payer by address or name. Select the payer, and enter payment details like the check amount and number. Select the button titled, "Add Pay In, then Select Another". Move that check over to the, "Done" pile, then grab the next check and enter it. In this manner, you can enter a huge number of checks in very short order. For each one, you'll have a manual pay in recorded. You can then view the automated allocations and receive the pay ins, or pass it along to your bookkeeper with their review process before receipting the payments.

Next, let's look at a scenario where you have a preauthorized payment method for a person, and you want to collect from their credit/debit card or bank account. When a person has a preauthorized payment method on file, you'll see a preauthorized icon beside their outstanding charges or bills, in their Money view. Select Options, then New Credit Card/Pay In to record a pay in. Enter the payment details, and select the saved payment method to use. (A person can preauthorize multiple payment accounts, if they wish.) Select Add Pay In, and you have submitted a payment, just as though the payer had done it themselves through their portal.

There are numerous other reasons you might manually record a pay in. We won't cover everything here, but we'll note a couple of them.

Previously we referenced using a non-integrated payment solution. If you want to use your cousin's payment processing platform, but it's not integrated with Harmony, you can still do so and take advantage of all the payment features of Harmony, albeit with some extra manual work. In this case, you'll set up your payment system as, "Manual (Non-integrated)", and configure your transaction and convenience fees as you have them in your external system. When you receive a payment through that outside system, just manually record it as a pay in within Harmony, and it will work just like Harmony payments without the automation.

If your integrated payment processor permits, you can also take payments over the phone or in person. In some cases, you will want a terminal installed in your office for this, so you can swipe cards. If you need that, you must select a payment processor that offers it, and go through the steps to set up: "on premises processing". However, if that's not needed, you can still manually add pay ins within Harmony for a credit card or check that's presented to you over the phone or in person. Recognize that this increases your legal exposure. Any time you are given the option to record a person's credit card information, it may require additional PCI compliance checks. When the payer only inputs their credit card through their Harmony portal or link, you don't ever see the credit card information, so you have no additional compliance requirements. This is true even with preapproved plans or preauthorized payment methods, where the credit card or bank information is stored in Harmony. The actual process is quite complex, but rest assured, Harmony knows you don't need one more headache, so we've created a solution that eliminates it.

There's a ton of fine details that are beyond this video, including dealing with disputes and chargebacks and handling other special cases. These are so rare that you may never encounter them. If you do, help resources are available to guide you through.

For now, you can relax. We've covered a lot, but you've reached the point where you're ready to set it and forget it, letting the money flow in while you sip pinya coladas on the beach. Congratulations!