North Aurora considers online utility billing

North Aurora is considering letting utility customers pay their water bills and parking tickets online directly to the village.

And the bills could be paid with any of the major credit cards if the village board approves the plan.

The board reviewed a proposal at its committee of the whole meeting this week and will be considered at the June 4 board meeting.

Customers receive paper bills for water and sewer charges. They can pay the bill — as well as parking tickets, ordinance violation fines and truck permit fees — online through the state’s E-Pay system.

However, E-Pay does not accept Visa credit cards, just MasterCard, Discover and American Express. It also accepts electronic checks for everything but the truck permits. And it charges a fee to the customer; the minimum fee, for transactions less than $25 is $1. Sixty-five to 75 North Aurora customers a month use E-Pay. The state then sends an email to the village, and a village employee manually records the amount on the customer’s account.

The village’s finance director has proposed using capabilities of a software system the finance department is already using for other tasks. Besides skipping the middleman on credit card payments, it would allow customers to see their accounts online, including usage history. They could sign up for paperless billing, including receiving reminders via email about their bills. They could set up recurring payments via credit card.

Yet to be determined is whether the water fund would eat the card processing fee credit issuers charge merchants, or pass the cost on to the card users. The village calculates that if just 15 percent of the water customers used the service, it would pay $7,500 to card issuers and $9,500 to the software company, but might save $5,600 in printing and postage if those customers chose paperless billing.