Lakeside Lodge Fully Automates Membership Payments with Albacs from Albany Software

Lakeside Lodge, a leisure complex located in the heart of Cambridgeshire, has selected ALBACS from e-transaction software author Albany Software to update and streamline its payment processes. This secure e-payment solution will smooth management of the health clubs’ new member payments through the collection of Direct Debits. ALBACS is a Bacs-approved e-payment solution. It will manage Lakeside Lodge’s hundreds of monthly membership payments, reduce impact on time and cost resources in the finance office and ensure payments are received on time.

Albany Software’s ALBACS will eliminate the costly, time-consuming paper-based methods of traditional funds transfer previously used by Lakeside Lodge, such as cheques and cash, offering a considerable return on investment and greatly increasing business efficiency. With minimal effort Lakeside Lodge will be able to process payments from its members, automatically receiving notifications and any error reports from Bacs.

Jane Hopkins, Club Secretary of Lakeside Lodge found ALBACS very easy to use, which proved an important driver in her decision to purchase the solution from Albany Software. She explains, “Implementing a new payment system was a somewhat daunting thought for us. The actual Direct Debit process appeared very complicated, but with Albany’s solution it turned out to be very simple and straight forward. Albany walked us through the entire process.”

Lakeside Lodge provides many activities such as golf, ten-pin bowling and a beauty salon, with facilities for conferences, accommodation, parties and corporate entertainment. The launch of the health club was a driving force behind the purchase of new software and has helped facilitate the growth of the membership base. Hopkins comments, “People expect a Direct Debit service these days so we wanted to ensure that we could offer our members this service seamlessly. We are now under pressure from our customers to process our payment collections automatically through Direct Debits, so we had to get something in place to make this possible. The ALBACS software from Albany allows us to automate all our payments easily and efficiently.”

With the roll out of electronic payments through ALBACS, Lakeside Lodge can abandon cheques and standing orders, replacing them with Direct Debit payments. Hopkins says, “Previously we have always offered a standing order scheme to our members but processing cheques and standing orders is always a very time consuming exercise, involving an intense amount of manual labour and added cost implications. We can now expand our customer base without having to worry about incurring extra costs from actioning additional payments.”

Following successful implementation of the new software for the health club payments, Lakeside Lodge plans to roll out the software throughout the rest of the leisure centre, creating fully automated payments for all membership payments.

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