Amenity reservations can provide meaningful value to residents and communities. However, collecting fees and deposits often creates extra work for management teams.
Without an integrated payment process, community managers may need to collect paper check deposits and manually reconcile each reservation. Amenity Payments are now available in FRONTSTEPS Community, bringing these tasks into the workflow for management teams.
Amenity Payments: Seamless for Residents, Automatic for the Books
Instead of coordinating separate payments for clubhouses, pools, meeting rooms, sports facilities, and other community spaces, residents can complete the required payment steps during their reservation.
By connecting reservations with convenient digital payment options, management companies can provide a more streamlined resident experience while keeping payment information tied to the appropriate facility and reservation.
Give Residents a More Convenient Payment Experience
Residents can pay using a saved card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. They also receive an email confirmation for successful bookings, helping them keep track of their reservation details.
Amenity Payments can also simplify the collection of security deposits. Rather than requiring residents to submit a paper check or having the community withdraw money for possible incidentals, the system can place an authorization hold on the resident’s card.
Managers can then capture or release the hold as needed based on the reservation. This creates a more convenient process for residents while eliminating the need to collect, store, and return paper deposit checks.
Reduce Manual Work for Community Managers
Management teams can:
- Collect payment through the amenity reservation process
- Configure flat, hourly, or daily pricing for each facility
- Set deposit requirements and cancellation policies
- Manage authorization holds from the reservation
- Maintain a clear record of amenity-related transactions
By bringing payments and reservations together, teams can spend less time following up on checks, updating spreadsheets, and comparing reservation records with payment information.
Create Additional Revenue Opportunities
Amenity Payments can also help management companies create or expand fee-based amenity programs across the communities they serve.
Flexible pricing allows teams to choose a payment model that fits each space. A clubhouse might have a flat rental fee, while a meeting room could use hourly pricing and another facility could be reserved by the day.
Making these fees easier to collect can help communities generate more consistent revenue from shared spaces without creating a separate manual payment process for staff.
Keep Amenity Financials Connected
Amenity Payments connect reservation activity with FRONTSTEPS Caliber.
When payments are captured, credits and future-dated charges can automatically post using the appropriate account coding. If a reservation is canceled, related ledger entries are automatically reversed, reducing the need for manual accounting cleanup.
Each entry also includes an audit trail with the reservation ID, homeowner information, and account coding, giving management teams clearer records for reconciliation and reporting.
How to Enable Amenity Payments
First, contact your Customer Success Manager to walk through the following steps together and implement Amenity Payments for your community.
- Set Up Your Posting Code
Create a posting code that maps amenity transactions to the appropriate accounts in your chart of accounts. This helps ensure that debits and credits are recorded correctly.
- Enable Payments for Your Facilities
Select an existing or new amenity, choose the pricing model, enter any deposit requirements, and configure the cancellation policy. You can then enable payments for the facility.
