You’ve got to collect money from your occupants, and your occupants want to pay online. In some cases, your occupants want to automate this with a set-it-and-forget-it solution. For all this and more, HERO Harmony has you covered, and it’s better than what you’ll find anywhere else.

When accepting online payments with Harmony, there’s no upcharge, surcharge, or any other sort of premium that you pay. Your payment transaction rate is your rate, with nothing due to HERO no matter how many, or how few, payments you process. (Note that free Pay-As-You-Go accounts do have a charge for each online payment received.)

With Harmony, you have your choice of three fully integrated payment processing platforms, and you can use any non-integrated platform manually. You simply choose which platform works for you, and all your online payments are processed through your account on your platform. We’ll go into that a little more below.

Harmony payments give you everything you need, including the option to charge convenience fees, automatically calculate transaction fees, pass along fees to the owner/association, automate payments with preapproved plans, process payments with preauthorized methods, collect application and booking fees online, and more. Note that how fees are handled may be subject to certain laws that affect your business; that’s covered in more detail in other articles.

Now back to the platforms…Harmony includes three fully integrated platforms, with more to come as the need arises. Each one has pros and cons, so you should make an informed decision when choosing your platform. We’ll highlight a few of the big pros and cons in the lists below.

Fully Integrated Platform: Global Payments Integrated

Pros:

• The rate for all qualified HERO accounts is 2.7% for credit cards, and $1.00 per ACH, regardless of the payment amount. (And extremely high volume processors may qualify for an even better rate!)
• As a true merchant account provider, you are evaluated exclusively based on your own business. In other words, the success or failure of other companies doesn’t drag you down as it can with aggregators, who can freeze payments or accounts unexpectedly.
• HERO members receive premium merchant support.
• As a Fortune 500® company and a member of the S&P 500, Global Payments has a strong position and reputation.

Cons:

• Because you have your own standalone merchant account, the onboarding and qualification process can be intensive.
• There are minimum fees to be paid to Global Payments for your account, which can impact companies with low processing volume.

Best For:

• Property managers and association managers who are well established and have decent processing volume.

Fully Integrated Platform: Stripe

Pros:

• Simple and fast account setup.
• No monthly account fees and good transaction rates.
• Easy to understand and use.
• Broad card and US bank account acceptance.

Cons:

• Payments take at least 2 days to reach your trust account.
• ACH rate of 0.8% ($5 cap).

Best for:

• Companies that are not as large or well established, or have low processing volume, or seek a simple solution that works consistently and reliably.

Fully Integrated Platform: PayPal

Pros:

• Best brand recognition.
• Easy account setup.
• Allows payment from PayPal balance as well as cards and bank accounts.
• Many payments are available in your trust account immediately (sometimes for a fee).

Cons:

• Poor support for account holders.
• More manual work to transfer and reconcile payments received.
• Limited automatic payment options.

Best for:

• Companies looking for a recognized brand where payments can be made from a PayPal balance or PayPal wallet.

Do you need to use a different platform for your payments? It’s possible we can fully integrate your platform into Harmony – just ask! If we cannot integrate your platform you can continue to use it with Harmony, it just won’t be fully integrated and automatic. There’ll be a little manual input for you to do, but probably less than you’re doing with any other solution.

As you can see, Harmony gives you a broad range of options so you can choose which platform is best for your business. When you’re ready to implement a payment platform, you just select that platform in your Harmony settings, and you are guided through the entire setup process. Once your payment platform account is ready, you can begin accepting online payments easily, accurately, and economically!