Getting started with Payreq Group

Payreq Group is for organisations that receive documents for many properties, customer accounts or business locations: property managers, accounts teams and anyone else handling documents in volume. Payreq calls you a group customer.

This guide uses the current Payreq Group name. Some subscription and account-setting screens still use the older label Payreq MyBills Agent. They refer to the same group-delivery workflow.

What Payreq Group gives you

A Payreq Group Mailbox works differently from an ordinary Payreq Mailbox. It unlocks:

• subscribing many properties or accounts at once, rather than one at a time;
• viewing and downloading documents in bulk; and
• a download preference, so a file of recently delivered documents arrives automatically.

These tools depend on your Mailbox being set up as a business Mailbox. If yours was created as an ordinary personal Mailbox, you will not see the Payreq Group options, and only Payreq Support can change the type. Contact us rather than creating a second Mailbox.

If you need bulk delivery from one organisation and ordinary email delivery from another, you need two separate Mailboxes. The delivery options available are tied to the Mailbox type rather than chosen for each subscription.

Setting up

1. Create a Payreq account at go.payreq.com, or use Add Payreq Account if you already sign in to Payreq.
2. When asked Is your Payreq Inbox for a business?, select Yes and enter the requested details.
3. Verify the email address used for the account.
4. Invite the other people in your team who need access.

If an existing Mailbox was set up as personal and you now need the Group features, contact Payreq Support. Only Support can change the existing Mailbox type.

Use a shared address for the account, and give your team their own logins

Create the Payreq account with a generic, team-wide address, such as an accounts or administration address, rather than one person's individual address.

This matters more than it sounds. The person who downloads documents is often an administrator rather than the property manager, and when they leave without handing over, an account tied to their personal address is stranded: nobody else can open that mailbox to complete a password reset. A shared address protects you against exactly that.

Use the shared address to keep the account recoverable, not to do the day-to-day work. Add each person who subscribes to properties, downloads documents or changes settings as their own named user instead, with only the access they need. This keeps a record of who did what in the account, and removing one person's access when they leave does not touch the account itself or anyone else's access. See Adding and removing users.

Notification preferences belong to the person who sets them, not the Mailbox, and they apply to every Mailbox that person can access, so a user cannot turn notifications on for one and off for another. Make sure at least one active member of your team has notifications turned on for new documents, rather than relying on the shared address to catch them. See Managing account notifications.

Who manages your subscriptions

This is the part most new Payreq Group users are not told, and it changes what you can do in Payreq.

You manage them yourself. You add and remove properties in Payreq as your portfolio changes.

The issuing organisation manages them for you. Some councils and utilities ask you to authorise them to maintain your subscriptions from their own customer records. Once you accept that authorisation, your subscriptions are created and removed automatically whenever they update their records, and you can no longer add a property yourself.

Under the second model, you can still remove a subscription and still return a document you were sent in error, but the organisation's records are what decide the outcome. If their records still list you against a property, the subscription comes back the next time they update.

You always have to tell the organisation

Whichever model applies, authorisation does not mean the organisation finds out about your portfolio changes on its own. When you take on or give up a property, tell them, in whatever way they ask for. Some have a formal managing agent notification form. If yours does not, ask what they want.

If you stop telling them, your subscriptions drift away from the properties you actually manage, and neither side notices until documents go to the wrong place or stop arriving.

Start receiving documents

1. Tell the council, utility or other organisation that you are authorised to manage the relevant property or account, and complete its change-of-address or managing agent process.
2. In Payreq, open Subscriptions and select Subscribe.
3. Search for the service and choose Payreq MyBills Agent, which is the current interface label for the Payreq Group delivery option.
4. Enter one property or account, or use the bulk upload option where offered.
5. Submit the request and complete any verification steps.

The issuing organisation may review the request before documents begin arriving. See Subscribing properties and accounts to a service.