Why Okaloosa County switched
John Anderson has spent 28 years with the Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller, the last 16 as Chief Deputy of Court Operations. When the office started planning a move to a new case management system, he also started looking for a new payment provider. He found PayIt by watching how its payment pages worked for other agencies, before he ever picked up the phone.
“What got my attention was a website where I was watching web payments, and I saw how the interface interacted with the public. I hadn’t seen that before. When I saw that front end, I knew the work on the back end would be just as good, and it has been.” John Anderson, Chief Deputy of Court Operations, Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
One system instead of two
Vanessa Pakvis manages Customer Service and Court Financial Services for the Clerk’s office, across both the Fort Walton Beach and Crestview locations. Before PayIt, her team ran two separate payment vendors, one for court cases and one for official records, and reconciled both by hand every day. One of those vendors had a payment bug that nobody could explain.
“We were having an issue with one of our vendors where money would suddenly get refunded to the customer after they had already left. Cashiers had to keep the customer at the counter and refresh the page just to check. They could never explain what was causing it. Since we switched to PayIt, we haven’t had that experience at all, and it’s improved customer satisfaction.” Vanessa Pakvis, Manager of Customer Service and Court Financial Services, Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
With PayIt, cashiers at both offices log into one system and pull reports for both payment types from the same place. At the end of the day, they check their card-machine totals against the till balance report from PayIt, a smaller reconciliation job that catches most problems before the next morning.
Catching traffic school problems early
The Clerk’s office also uses ProSight, PayIt’s admin portal for agency staff, to manage traffic school elections. Residents apply online to elect traffic school and pay their ticket, and staff can check eligibility. For example, staff can check if someone already elected in the past 12 months before the resident pays instead of after the state rejects it.
Applicants get a response within 48 hours and upload their completion certificate directly through the platform instead of mailing it in or visiting an office.
A stress test, not a shutdown
An update once broke the connection between PayIt and the Clerk’s case management system, and payments stopped posting automatically for some case types. Anderson and Pakvis used training PayIt had given their staff to set up a manual payment option in minutes, so cashiers kept taking card payments at the counter and online. Staff posted those payments by hand once the connection was restored, and no resident had to be turned away.
“We sat down and remembered the training PayIt had given us. They give us the capability of spinning up a point of sale in minutes. We went from not being able to take credit cards for court payments to taking them normally, we just had to manually move the receipting information over. It worked, and we kept it going until the fix was applied.” John Anderson, Chief Deputy of Court Operations, Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
What Okaloosa County tells other Florida clerks
“It’s really easy to work with PayIt. The innovation is there, the creativity is there, and the attention is there. You call, somebody answers. You email, somebody answers. I think it’s a vendor you can have a relationship with.” John Anderson, Chief Deputy of Court Operations, Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
“It’s been such a great experience, and I’m looking forward to expanding with the products that are available.” Vanessa Pakvis, Manager of Customer Service and Court Financial Services, Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
