Stupid Usability #123 - Paying Rent Online An Account Verifier would Help

From the mind of Brian Haukos, Marketing & Project Support at High Monkey: I love where I live and have no complaints about it, but when it comes to paying rent there are some issues! When I signed the lease to rent the house that 3 roommates and I share, I was a bit cautious. The reason for being cautious had to deal directly with the property management company being located in Georgia, but they assured us that it wouldn’t be a problem. When signing the lease and providing a down payment I would agree that it was silly for me to worry about. Everything went smoothly and we moved in without any issues. When it came time to pay rent for the first official time there was a system in place where you could enter in your bank information and the rent amount would automatically be taken from your account! This worked well but unfortunately for us the Property management company decided they were no longer going to use this payment system and discontinued it. At first this seemed like a big deal but after realizing there was an office near where I worked where I could physically drop off our checks it wasn’t much of a problem at all. This worked well up until when the property management company decided they were going to give another online payment service a try. This new system worked similar to the old system where you were able to enter in your bank account information and pay your portion of the rent total. With this system my roommates and I were able to pay each of our portions of the rent simply and without issues.

Or so we thought. Unfortunately if you accidentally entered any of your bank information incorrectly there was no message saying that an error occurred and the system tried to pull money from the account even if that so called account didn’t exist. After feeling as if all of us had paid our portion of the rent on time, we got a message 2 weeks later saying that we were late on our rent and that there was a charge of $30 due to the system returning funds that it thought it originally received. This happened because someone made and error while typing in their account information and the system didn’t catch it.

Although this problem has since been resolved in our case, it would be a good idea for this new system to have some sort of account checker to verify that an account you enter actually exists vs the system just assuming it does, as well as some sort of error letting you know that so called account doesn’t exist if entered incorrectly.