Whether it’s a parent paying for a school trip, the authority accepting donations to one of its charitable causes, someone paying for a printout of a historical document, a place on a training course, or a subscription to Dorset Food and Drink, the act of making a payment online is a repeatable task. This is why the development team identified this as an area where processes could be streamlined, delivery times reduced, and the whole experience improved.
It made no sense that a service wanting to receive a new type of payment online meant that a brand new solution had to be commissioned and developed each time, this can be expensive and longwinded. The time taken to do this in the past often meant that the window of opportunity was missed and the value of receiving payments coming into the authority electronically was not realised.
Through discussion with colleagues in Finance, we agreed that accepting payments online was a must-have in today’s digital world, with the ability to enable this quickly and easily. We came up with 3 objectives:
- Enabling a new service to receive payments online should not be a technical task. The Accounts Receivable team should be able to do this themselves without the involvement of ICT.
- Monies coming into the authority electronically should be automatically reconciled and recharged to the appropriate budget.
- The solution should continue to be easy & secure for a citizen to pay Dorset County Council electronically.
Having defined these objectives we started to map-out how the process could work. We quickly identified that at the heart of this was a generic, re-usable ePayments engine that made it all possible. We started to look at what would be required for this engine and how we would develop it, when I read this blog from the Government Digital Services (GDS) team. The GDS team had built their reputation of building solutions that made it simple for people to consume complex services, online. I was aware the GOV.UK Pay was available to central government, but I wasn’t really sure how it fit into the process, it soon became clear that this was the generic, re-usable ePayments engine that we were going to build ourselves, and using GOV.UK Pay would save us time and resource.
We have now embedded GOV.UK Pay into our overall solution, new services can be setup in less than a day to receive ePayments. We have a process that takes the money received in our bank account, uses GOV.UK Pay to lookup what services that money was received for and automatically recharges the service budget(s) in our central finance system. We even have the ability for a customer to make a payment against a specific invoice that they have received from us, which will then be fed back into our finance system and pay against their account.
We are fortunate to have the skills to develop this functionality ourselves, integrating GOV.UK Pay with many of our existing web pages, whereas a lot of other organisations have to rely on external companies to develop these solutions on their behalf. GDS do provide the option of a “Simple Payment” which means that a service can be set up to receive electronic payments without the need of a website to link to it. Using a URL that is generated by GOV.UK Pay, you’re able to send this link in a letter or an email to a customer, who can then simply go to this address and make a payment of either a set amount or an amount they enter themselves, all without the need of any technical development.
The jigsaw that is GOV.UK Pay sitting alongside our own developments, all supporting the services provided to our citizens is a brilliant example of the public sector working in harmony. GDS sharing GOV.UK Pay to the rest of the public sector has meant that we do not need to build the same thing over and over again, ultimately saving public money.
Local Government through the work of LocalDigital are identifying more and more opportunities to work together, all in the interest of providing simple, easy to use, efficient and cost effectives services – it’s not easy, but long may it continue!
Glen Conroy, Solutions Manager
Hi Glen
I’d be really interested to talk to you more about what you’ve achieved here using Pay. It’s something we are keen to look at as part of our payment project so we’d really like to discuss the approach and how you’ve done it. Could you drop me a line so we can set something up please?