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North Augusta temporarily takes online utility portal offline after payment posting errors; billing schedule adjusted
Summary
City staff said an online payment gateway issue tied to Clover/Fiserv caused payments not to post to accounts. The portal was taken offline while vendors investigate. Staff confirmed May bill mailings and gave new due dates and a plan to restore normal cycles by August.
City staff reported to the Northwest City Council study session that a problem with the city’s online payment gateway was causing some customer payments to fail to post to account ledgers, prompting the temporary shutdown of the portal while vendors investigate.
“We have a number of people that we can verify that have made an online payment that have not has not shown up on their bill, because it’s not transiting over,” Finance staff said in the presentation. Staff identified Clover and Fiserv as the systems involved and said open support tickets are active with both vendors.
To prevent further customer confusion and manual reconciliation work for staff, the city temporarily disabled the online payment portal while staff and vendors work on the data transfer problems. Staff said they will post an updated notice on the city website and on social channels.
Staff also gave a timeline for mailed bills: May 10 bills were mailed with a July 11 due date; May 25 bills were mailed with a July 21 due date; the team expects to mail the next set of bills the following Monday and aims to return to a normal billing cycle by August. Administration said switching vendors is an option under review but would require council action and may incur transition costs.
Council members asked staff to post the outage notice publicly and to pursue vendor options to reduce future disruptions. No formal council action on vendor contracts was taken at the study session.
