Jackson Heights Life

Hi neighbors,

I'm the new treasurer at one of the many co-ops in the neighborhood. We are a self-managed building, and we've always done things old-school, with paper maintenance checks each month. I'm hoping to give our residents the option to pay their maintenance electronically. Has anyone at a self-managed building set this up successfully? The roadblock I've encountered is that Zelle, which is the app that powers most inter-bank transactions (as I understand it) has a $1000 daily transaction limit. That's less than some of our units pay in maintenance, so it seems like a no-go. I'm looking for a workaround and would love any advice!

Many thanks.

zelle doesn't play well with some credit unions as well.....

I live in one of the self-managed co-ops in the area and pay my monthly maintenance fee electronically via an ACH bank transfer.  As far as I know all banks accept incoming ACH transfers (I believe that's the standard mechanism used for direct deposit/payroll).  While not all banks support it (or at least not freely/easily), I'm under the impression that somewhere around half of the residents here pay electronically and I assume all do so using ACH (rather than something like Zelle).  My bank, USAA, has a $5k limit for such transfers.

This is all I know at the moment (our president, who knows all, is out of town)--our coop has an account at the bank. My accounts are with Chase, and I set up autopays for most of my bills, including maintenance, so I don't have to remember to make payments every month.

It does not matter where any of these payments go, when I set up "payees" in the account, I input the bank name, address, and our account number, where the maintenance payment goes. It does not have to be paid into a Chase account because I am paying from a Chase account. I don't recall doing anything more than that (though I might not be remembering--I started this 6 years ago when we moved here.) When I have to make additional payments to the coop like laundry fees, which we pay quarterly, I go into my "payees" list in Chase online, choose the coop, and just enter the payment and press send.

I choose when the bank is to send the payment when I set it up, say, on the 21st of each month for the next month. The system tells me when to send the payment so that it will reach the coop account by the first of the month. Chase actually sends a printed check, so you have to send out the payments about 5-7 days before the due date.

Sometimes there might be a glitch in the system. I think one of us once had her payments somehow get lost in the system and not reach the coop account--and that had to be sorted out. We have a couple of elderly tenants who may not be using this system--at least one of them does not use a computer-- and may actually visit the bank and deposit a check into the coop account. I really have no idea, but I am pretty sure that nobody is sending checks to our treasurer for him to deposit.

I do recall there being a bit of an issue because HSBC has no way of noting where each payment came from, so it's not so easy to figure out who did not pay if there is a shortfall in the account. Once there were missing payments, and we all got an email from our treasurer asking us to make sure we had paid every month, and to document that. It turned out that one person's bank had stopped sending her autopayments, because they had a rule that autopayments had to be confirmed every six months. She did not realize she was behind on payments.

Thank you so much for the detailed info, ljr and Shallot! I appreciate the leads and am looking forward to bringing our building into the 21st Century