“The Gravity team always made it feel like it was about Onboard. The team paid attention, understood the opportunity, and helped us do something that’s never been done before in the apartment or HOA space”.
– RYAN WELLS, COO, ONBOARD.
About Onboard
Onboard is a third-party platform that deploys, supports, and manages amenities such as internet, smart apartment and 5G to residential rental, HOA and multi-family dwellings. Onboard’s service relieves the pressure on property management teams by converting valuable bulk services to fully-managed community programs. The platform is an integrated API partner of property management softwares such as Yardi, RealPage, and Entrata.
Onboard’s platform is developed for property management companies and HOA organizations that want to benefit from the savings that come with bulk-purchasing technology amenities, but don’t want to manage the billing, or combine the utility payments with rent and HOA fees.
Challenges
Onboard’s initial build featured an out-of-the-box invoicing solution that did not include the ability to maintain a month-to-month running balance. In addition, Onboard had to handle payment collection and distribution to clients. This presented administrative hurdles and introduced other financial implications – a roadblock to the platform’s operational viability and scalability.
Project Scope
“We consulted on different ways Onboard could run their business while offloading work that didn’t make sense for them to manage. By establishing our partner’s vision, rather than a quick fix, we’ve helped make changes to their business model to ensure a better end-user experience”.
– AARON HART, SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT
- Transition Onboard from a money management “middle man” to a true technology facilitator
- Introduce true accounts-based billing with running balances for residents
- Develop auto-generated invoices, and distribution through email & direct mail notifications
- Reduce administrative burden to ensure product scalability
- Seamlessly integrate into Onboard’s proprietary platform
- Provide the option to charge late fees & convenience fees
Project Consultation
Achieving a partner’s vision through in-depth business analysis, and collaborative project definition, ideation, and implementation.
The team at Gravity performed a thorough evaluation of Onboard’s current and anticipated business environment, and offered solutions that allowed both partners to focus on their specialties. This assessment transformed the project scope from a simple payments API to a fully-customized enterprise billing solution. Gravity’s development team reoriented Onboard’s billing, and helped them achieve a highly-functional, scalable residential amenity platform.
“Gravity’s team was absolutely crucial to helping us understand what we were getting into. We didn’t know anything about direct billing, and having a team that came in with that knowledge helped us identify how we had to build our product.”
– RYAN WELLS, COO
Solution
Accounts-based billing, integrated customer onboarding, and a white-labeled customer-facing payments portal.
Gravity worked with Onboard to rebuild their billing backend, and introduce a resident-facing frontend portal for a seamless, individualized payment solution. In addition, Gravity Payments fully maintains the status of all customer accounts, and routes residents’ payments to the building or HOA management.
MyAccount Features
- Self-service portal
- Customer-elected payment methods (credit card, ACH & mail-in check)
- Secure card storage
- Balance-carrying capabilities
- Autopay recurring billing
- Email & direct mail notifications
MyConsole Features
- Easy to use management features
- Integrated customer onboarding
- Portfolio, unit, customer and plan account management
- Request and modify payments
- View full payment and account history
