Overview of Convenience Fees in SecurePark
Convenience Fees are charged on a transaction in SecurePark (regardless of how many violations are being paid) and are automatically added to the transaction if they have been set up in SecurePark.
Convenience Fees are set up by a Primary Admin. They can be removed or edited at any time through the Settings page.
Convenience Fees are charged to your company on every transaction in SecurePark, whether that is a validation or a violation. However, you as the customer can choose the amount that is passed to the end-user. You may choose to pass the full amount agreed upon between your company and SecurePark; you may increase the amount to include your fees, or you may wish to absorb the entire amount altogether by entering $0.00 in the fields.
Admin users taking payment within SecurePark also have the option to exclude the fee from being charged to the end-customer on both violations and validations, and have that fee be covered by your company instead. These exclusions can be set to be automatic, which is done through the Settings page, or they can be done on a case-by-case basis at the time of payment.
Convenience fees are not charged by SecurePark on payments taken by any other means other than credit card (such as cheques, cash, or debit).
Below are instructions on how to set these fees and manage them in SecurePark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8276x5B2aQ&feature=youtu.be
1. Set up the Convenience Fees (Admin only)
Navigate to Settings > Company > Convenience Fee
Shown above are three separate fields:
- Validation payments, which is the fee charged on a paid validation, or parking session
- Violation payments by Admin, which is the fee charged only on the admin payment page within SecurePark
- Violation payments through payment portal, which is the fee charged to the end-user on the public-facing payment page
If you do not want to charge a convenience fee on payments taken by an admin, you would enter $0.00 in the Admin field. However, this simply means that the end user is not being charged; SecurePark will still charge you the agreed convenience fee for the transaction at the end of the month.
2. Validation Payments with Convenience Fee
If an amount other than $0.00 is entered under the Validation Payments field in Settings, a convenience fee will automatically be charged when an admin takes a payment. However, admin have the option to exclude the fee from being charged to the end-user at the time of payment by checking off "Exclude convenience fee" under the Convenience Fee box. Then the admin may continue to take the payment details as normal.
3. Violation Payments by Admin
Although the convenience fee setup under Settings is automatically charged on admin payments (unless it's set at $0.00), an admin can also exclude the fee from being passed to the end-user. To do this, continue to do the Admin payment page as you normally would, then similar to the above, select "Exclude Convenience Fee" under the payment details, and complete the payment.
4. Violation Payments through Payment Portal
When payments are done through the public-facing payment portal, unless the convenience fee set here is at $0.00, it will always be charged to the end user and cannot be excluded.
Since Convenience Fees are charged per transaction and not per violation, a user can select as many outstanding violations as they wish and the fee will remain the same.
Once the user selects the violations they would like to pay, the total is updated and with the Convenience Fee included. The user then scrolls down to the Billing Information and Address. Here, they are required to enter their Credit Card information, and depending on the Required fields you have set under the Payment Page settings, they may be required to enter more.
Under the Email field we have let users know that their email is required if they'd like a receipt.
All users are required to read and agree to the Terms and Conditions in order to proceed with the payment. If they do not agree, they are prompted to accept with an error message.
Once they have accepted and hit Review, they are then shown an additional message indicating that there will be a Convenience Fee charged, and what the amount of the Fee is.
If they click Cancel they are taken back to the payment page with their information still entered. If they click OK, they are then taken to the confirmation screen, and then from there they can continue on to finally submit their payment.
5. Viewing Convenience Fee Transactions
You can view all the Convenience Fee charges at any time by navigating to the Payments Reconciliation Report and searching for the required parameters. Convenience Fee transactions are separated, but are tied to the violations paid by the Transaction ID.