If this isn't the place for this question then simply disregard it.

I work for a small, semi-rural, county government and I inherited the duty of working on the county's website when I started here. While there's definitely room for improvement it has come leaps and bounds from where it was.

Now the powers-that-be have decided that we (the county and more specifically the IT department) should start offering web-based services that will require credit card processing.

Since we have multiple departments that would all be utilizing the payment system we'd like to have one account to economize the fees. But each transaction must be able to be tracked to the department (and transaction) that generated the revenue.

So my question is who do I contact to find out how to implement this? A bank? A web-design firm? I'm going to Google the topic it but I thought I'd seek advice from the people I trust as well.

If I was faced with a simular challenge, I would check out (yellow pages or google) for a web design firm that has handled this kind of thing. It sounds quite do-able, but it also sounds like you might need some custom tweaking.

AND, perhaps, there might be SOMEONE who uses this site that can do this type of work and you can hire them to handle this part of the project.

I myself stay away from bank cards, the internet, and money!

thats ok, Reinman, you can send me whatever bank cards, money, and internets you have. I'll use them!

try paypal, there site is very clear:
http://www.paypal.com

Are you wanting the credit card processing to be tied into your site where you can verify payment and then immediately provide the services that the person purchased? How are you planning on knowing whether they've paid with their credit card in order to provide them the service? It's very similar to what JMH has done for this site, whether you are a paying Advantage member or not.

In the place I worked for last year, we had an integration with Verisign (www.verisign.com). They have an API that you can tie into to process the creditcard/get authorization/etc. It was not a cheap way to go, but it worked for our needs (pretty large-scales sites we were working on).

It all depends on how you want to do it. If you have any specific questions that I might be able to help with, PM me.

I don't imagine it will be very difficult to tag or label the payments for tracking.......there are so many Merchant Account providers available on the net. I would be willing to bet that some even have templates for doing such.

I work for a County govt. too and we accept online payments for car tag renewals and used to accept property tax payments too, but recently stopped taking tax payments.....I doubt they used the same account though due to them being completely different departments with different operating budgets. We may be a larger county than you but I would guess that they have seperate accounts.

If needed I can give you the e-mail address of our webmaster who might know or be willing to tell you how it is done here.

WOW!

You guys are awesome! I was hoping to get some advice and you didn't disappoint.

Here's some more details if it helps to clarify what I'm looking for and what direction I need to look at.

Again this is a county organization. Basically it's like lots of smaller companies working for a larger company and each has it's own needs. But in order to save on the transaction processing fees we'd like to consolidate all the transactions to get us into the best fee scale possible. I don't imagine us having more than 1000 transactions a month in the beginning.

Some of the department functions that we'll need to process credit card payments are:

- Parks, payment of online camping reservations, shelter reservations, boating fees, etc.
- Register of Deeds, payment of fees for vital records copies
- Treasurer, payment of property taxes
- Clerk of Courts, payment of fines
- Unified Services (County-owned mental health clinic), payment of outstanding balance

So yes we'll need immediate processing and validation along with tracking the payment back to the department so that they can record the revenue in the general ledger.

I aint looking it up for ya, but there are such things as 'county government associations'..
who's specific function is to share the best solutions for anything 'county government'
among all...you guessed it..'county governments'.
Looks like a hard job..best of luck.
I seriously like the "Paypal" suggestion m'self. People can pay ya just like they were sending in a check, and not a major revamp job on your sites, plus not all the new security concerns and tracking..too good.

uh...send them to me and i ll process them for you... for a fee of course.. he he he.. [/i]

i think you need a data base to split the payments and send them to the correct departments

Hi Tofu,

I actually am a part owner in a company that does exactly that kind of thing. Just email me the info and I will have my IT guy get in contact with you.

Cherree

Cherree@corp.nutech.com