Convenience Fee Charge

This feature will allow billing admins to offset the charge the Firm incurs when accepting payments with LawPay. Additional charges can now be added when clients of the Firm pay with LawPay.

In order to start charging a Convenience Fee, the Firm needs to designate accounts to receive these charges. These are located in the accounting settings in the System Settings, on individual Clients, or on individual Matters.

This charge can be enabled across all my Bills by going to the System Settings > Payment Processor > General settings page.

• From there, enable the charging of an additional “Convenience Fee” to each LawPay transaction
• “Credit Card Convenience Fee Percent” determines the percent of the original transaction gets added as a convenience fee.
  • If a client paid off a Bill with a $500 credit card transaction, and the Convenience Fee Percent was 3%, the final LawPay transaction would be for $515.
• An amount can be specified that has to be reached before applying the extra fee. If this amount is $0, all LawPay transactions will have the added Convenience Fee.
• If the threshold is set at $100 and a client pays a $50 Bill with their credit card, they are not charged the Convenience Fee.

• Certain State and Federal Laws might require your Firm to pay taxes on these Convenience Fees. It can be set if the Fee is taxable, and precisely how much of it is taxed.
  • Example: Let’s say laws governing my Firm require I pay back %5 of these Convenience Fees, and my client is paying a $5000 Bill with a %2 Convenience Fee. The Client’s payment ends up totaling $5100, with $5000 going to the Bill and $100 going to the Convenience Fee. However, since the Convenience Fee is taxed, %5 of that $100 will go to taxes, or $5. The $95 will go to the Convenience Fee Account chosen earlier, and the $5 will go to the Convenience Fee Tax Account.
• Finally, the Firm has the option to alert their Client whenever they will be charged a Convenience Fee.
  • If chosen, the Client will be explicitly made aware of the percentage of the total being added, as well as the final amount, before being prompted for their card info.
  • However, regardless of this option, the window where the Client enters their card info will be the amount after adding any Convenience Fee.
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  • Any Payments in Centerbase generated from these transactions will show how much of the total payment went to the Convenience Fee, as well as how much was taxed if any.
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  • If need be, the amount of the Convenience Fee can be changed after the fact to better reflect the actual payment received. If the amount can be changed, clicking the amount of the Convenience Fee will bring up a dialog to allow editing the amount.
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