New landlord - any recommendation on rental payment system?

[Jayme Jahns]

Hello! I'm a soon to be new landlord for a fully occupied quadplex and have been studying laws and basically learning to be a landlord from the ground up. 

One thing I am having trouble deciding is which online rental payment system to use. Here is what I am looking for:

Either free of low cost to me 

Autopayment

One time payment

Automatic late fees 

Ability to give a discount inventive to tenants who use auto pay

Payment Options:

Direct deposit from checking account

Credit

Debit 

A call in option if no computer access

I've looked at dozens of sites and didn't find all of these features without a bit of a higher cost to me. 

Any recommendations? Am I simply giving too many options to my tenants?

I am trying to look at this from a tenants perspective. I hate being forced into auto pay especially for something as costly as rent. So I thought I would give the option to use 1 time payments as well but add the incentive for auto. 

In your experience is it just better to do auto pay only because it will prevent late fees or did your transaction ever have insufficient funds anyway? 

Thanks for advice! 

[Sandy Uhlmann]

After much research on the various companies that offer online payments, I chose eRentPayments.  They do charge $3 per transaction or $10/month for up to 10 ACH transactions going to the same account.  As far as the $3 transactions, you can pay or you an elect to have the tenants pay.  They do offer credit card payment option but these are much more expensive.  I do have one of my accounts with Cozy because it is completely free.  The big perk about eRentPayments over Cozy for me was that there was built in late charges that you customize to the terms of your lease.  This feature takes the "bad guy" aspect off of me when the rent is not there on time and puts it onto the eRentPayment because it bills tenants automatically if the rent is late rather than me having to follow up with the tenants and ask them to pay late fees.  Up until this time I was getting rent via mail.  I offered it to my tenants and was very surprised that ALL of my tenants signed up for it and now I just get payments debited to my rental account.  A new feature that I like that they just added is maintenance requests can now be processed through the site if you opt to do that.

Customer support has been fantastic so far.  I have not used the site for screening tenants but that may be my next step.