ClickPay Curing Payment Headaches at Senior Living Communities

The success of ClickPay at senior living communities is quickly erasing the perception that housing older residents mean doing things the old-fashioned way. Payments are a monthly burden at every type of property, but particularly at senior living properties. Most payment software isn’t designed to handle the peculiarities of senior living – such as the need to provide account access to multiple children or caretakers, and to centralize a range of payment types in one seamless system. And many systems don’t integrate with the accounting system in use, resulting in separate siloes of financial information. At many properties, an unusual number of payments are still made by paper check or money order, due both to the shortcomings of current payment systems and the traditional cautiousness of senior living properties when it comes to adopting the latest software. Processing paper payments is a notorious drag on front office productivity. And both checks and money orders are vulnerable to fraud, theft, and being misplaced. Addressing senior payment system shortcomings RealPage’s ClickPay has been making inroads into the senior living arena by addressing the shortcomings of other payment solutions in meeting the sector’s unique needs. Emily Kramer, a member of the ClickPay payments team at RealPage, provides an example. “At a typical multifamily property, you have one renter who pays the bills,” she explains. “But at a senior property, you often have someone else looking over the invoices and paying – perhaps even two or three different children or proxies. Your typical payment system doesn’t allow multiple log-ins.” Another problem she mentions is the confusion that can result from charges for ancillary services added to the balance at different times throughout the month, resulting in fluctuating balances that are difficult to understand. Kramer says the younger people handling payments on behal...