The Easy Way to Pay: Top 5 Strategies for Making Court Payments Accessible

What percentage of your community members’ fees, fines, and other court obligations are paid on time? What is the cost to your court and your other community resources when they’re not paid? For most communities, the cost is high, and courts like yours are looking for ways to help people meet their obligations.

Forward-thinking courts aren’t making the penalties more severe; they’re making the whole process easier and more accessible.

Here are the top 5 ways courts are bringing in more payments and building better community relationships in the process:

1. ePay – Yes, we had to start here. There’s simply no better way to make paying easier for your community members than to make it available online 24/7.
2. Kiosks – Once you have your payment system online with ePay, the next step is to make sure community members without personal internet access can still use the system. Internet-enabled kiosks placed strategically for community access can help make ePay readily available to all.
3. Flexibility – Expecting everyone to be able to pay in full right away is unrealistic. Offering people the ability to request a payment plan, reduced or waived fees, and other considerations can help the court collect what community members are able to pay.
4. Data-sharing – Ensure your online systems are connected in ways that make payment easy and seamless. For example, when you use online dispute resolution, make sure you choose a solution that can take payments directly and pass the information along to your case management system (CMS) so there’s no need to manually reconcile financials downstream.
5. Options – Whatever you do, keep the user experience in mind. They may be involved in multiple cases, they may prefer to put the payment on a credit card, or any other number of other circumstances. Your payment solution should be designed with the user in mind and offer options to make the experience as accessible as possible.

Anything your court can do to increase access and make payments easier for the public is a step in the right direction. Building access to the court builds relationships with the community.

Are you ready to start making payments easier for all? Get in touch today to learn more about how you can make all five of these strategies a reality for your court. We’re here to help.