Five North Carolina counties. One platform. Here’s what changed
Collection options that work for North Carolina counties
for Orange County
for Guilford County
Durham, Orange, Lee, Cumberland, and Guilford counties all collect property tax. They all faced the same pressures: residents expecting to pay online, staff managing paper-heavy processes, and legacy systems that made adding new payment types nearly impossible. Each county chose PayIt. Their teams describe what changed.
Residents pay on their own terms
For Durham County, the goal was straightforward: give residents more control over how and when they pay. That flexibility: paying from a phone at any time — without going to an office or mailing a check — is what residents expect now.
It will offer them the autonomy to pay when they want to and where they want to.
Revenue goes up. Paperwork goes down.
Orange County Collections Manager Valerie Curry points to two concrete outcomes: more ACH payments, and far less paper mail to manage.
Our ACH payments have actually increased exponentially about 55% or so since we implemented PayIt. We’ve seen the reduction of our paperwork. Basically, every single bill was mailed before and now about 8,000 of those are sent e-delivery.
Lee County’s results follow the same direction. Tax Administrator Michael Brown describes what happened to their collection rate after switching to PayIt.
We’ve actually increased our collection rate over the last couple of years. We set a record collection year last year.
A capability they’d been trying to add for years
Cumberland County came to PayIt with a specific gap to close. Their gross receipts customers, food and beverage operators and hotels subject to room occupancy tax had no online payment option. It was something the county had been trying to solve for a long time.
We were able to get that online with PayIt, which is something that we’ve tried to do or wanted to do for several years. Our clients are very, very pleased with that.
A process that works end to end
Guilford County’s Ben Chavis and Danielle McFadden describe a platform that handles complexity without adding friction. Property owners with multiple parcels can pay them all in one transaction. A customer with 40 properties pays one fee instead of running 40 separate transactions through the county’s cart feature.
The process is intuitive. The payment process is smooth. Everything gets updated automatically. The integration between tax and PayIt and then over to our finance — very, very fluid process for us.
When payments post automatically and the system updates in real time, the manual work of matching records drops significantly. McFadden’s team gets that time back.
A payment experience residents can trust
The payment process is intuitive and smooth. Residents complete transactions quickly, and every update happens automatically. Both Chavis and McFadden describe the overall result the same way.
The process is intuitive. The payment process is smooth. Everything gets updated automatically. The integration between tax and PayIt and then over to our finance — very, very fluid process for us.
That’s what the county set out to find, and what they’ve had since moving to PayIt.
Across five counties, the pattern is consistent. Residents get a modern payment experience. Staff spend less time on manual work. And counties collect more.
