What Are the Benefits of an Integrated Payments Solution?
October 28, 2024 by Jeff Dempsey, System Administrator, City of Madison, Wisconsin
The city of Madison adopted Tyler Payments in late 2021 and started using the Resident Access portal in 2022.
We went live with Tyler Payments in conjunction with Tyler Cashiering in 2022. Before that, we used another vendor for all our credit card processing.
Going to Tyler payments was very beneficial for the city. At some point, we had fallen out of PCI compliance because we were using the old magnetic swipe card readers. So, the city was paying fines every month.
That really prompted us to switch to Tyler Payments so that we could get back into PCI compliance. We're now saving our city and residents money by not having to pay those unnecessary fines.
And it's providing a much more secure way for our customers to make their payments because part of that PCI noncompliance was that we weren't using point-to-point encryption, which Tyler Payments uses. And we're confident that Tyler Payments is enabling us to stay within PCI compliance standards.
Choosing Payments
We decided to go with Tyler Payments for a number of reasons. We had already been using Tyler Cashiering since 2015, and we had no intention of changing that. We looked at the other payment processor options, but we like working with Tyler Technologies.
The Tyler Payments option made the most sense for us because of the streamlined integration that it provides between our various payment portals, whether it's point of sale, with Cashiering or online with Resident Access or Utility Access.
The integration is just fantastic.
Whereas, if we had decided to go with one of the other credit card processors, it would have been more work for our staff, just for reconciliation.
Tyler Payments was the way to go. It was a no brainer for us to choose Tyler payments.
The Benefits of an Integrated Solution
Also, having everything under one umbrella, dealing with one company, Tyler Technologies, is really beneficial when it comes to support or any number of issues. You're dealing with one company instead of trying to coordinate between multiple entities.
And we continue to buy into more Tyler products. It's taken a lot of the strain off of our IT department to not have to oversee and deal with multiple software vendors. It's just more security work they have to do, more integrations.
Tyler Payments is extremely beneficial when it comes to reviewing our financials because when a payment is made, whether online, over the phone with IVR, or at a cashiering station, it instantaneously integrates and updates on the EERP side. We can see the receipt immediately.
It creates the payments batch within EERP. It creates the journal entry, which then ultimately will hit our general ledger and or project ledger depending on the transaction.
This seamless integration makes everything so much more efficient for us, and it's just fantastic. The real time, it's instantaneous. When a payment is made, we can instantly see it flow throughout the system.
Working With Tyler
If any organization was considering Tyler Payments, and if they asked me, I would encourage them to move forward with that. It's a great solution if you're using Enterprise ERP, because of the integration. Having to deal with one software vendor as opposed to multiple vendors – it just simplifies everything.
I've been with the city for about seven years now, and I've worked very closely with Tyler tech support and other folks at Tyler. The experience has been extremely positive overall.
Tyler support is super helpful, and the online support portal is a great way to get assistance when we need it. The folks at Tyler Technologies are extremely receptive when we have ideas or suggestions.
As an early adopter, we worked closely with a lot of the Tyler Technologies staff when we were going live with Utilities Access and Resident Access, and we made a lot of enhancement suggestions, many of which they adopted. It's a real collaborative effort, I feel, because we're helping them make their product better, and they're helping us by taking our suggestions seriously and, being willing to consider them, if not outright adopting them and making them come to life. So, yes, working with Tyler Technologies is wonderful.