Customers have the option of paying water bills online using Unibank. It is similar to the online payment system used by the Town Collector for tax payments.  ACH transacions and certain credit cards are accepted.  An additional fee charged by Unibank applies to credit card transactions.

We are assigning new account numbers to most our water customers in anticipation of the Unibank online payment system going live.  Many of the old numbers are numerically coded versions of the service address that made manual bookkeeping easier but were never intended for use on the Internet.  The new numbers were assigned using a random number generator and should be much harder to guess.  The new numbers will be in use starting with the December 15, 2010 billing.

Beginning in July 2008, the majority of our customers are billed on a quarterly basis. One third of our customers are billed each month to distribute the workload and cash flow as evenly as possible over the year. Each quarter contains 3 billing cycles. Cycle #1 customers are billed during the first month of the quarter - January, April, July and October. Cycle #2 customers are billed in February, May, August and November. Cycle #3 customers are billed in March, June, September and December.

We are happy to bill customers monthly if they wish.  This is a popular option for some residents that participated in the monthly billing pilot study and with customers that want to monitor their water use and related expenses at a finer scale.

Customers that use online banking systems should send payments to the Town Collector, 8 West Common Street, Topsfield, MA 01983 rather than the Post Office Box listed on the return envelope. Online banking systems, except for the Town's Unibank system, do not issue payments electronically - the bank issues a printed check and mails it.  Sometimes the check isn't mailed for several days.

The PO Box on the return envelope is actually a Century Bank automated lock box that processes payments based on information printed on the bill stub.  If the scan line beneath the stub's mailing address is unreadable, or the stub is missing, then the lock box rejects the payment and forwards it to the Town Hall for manual processing.

In the event you need to make a payment to avoid a late penalty or termination of service, the safest thing to do is drop your payment off at the Town Hall.  The Town Treasurer & Collector's Office hours are posted online and there is a drop box at the front door near the Town Clerks' Office that is checked daily.  Late fees are typically calculated seven days after the due date to allow for any payments that might have been in transit near the due date.

Including the bill stub with your payment helps reduce our labor costs by reducing the number of hours spent processing and posting manual payments.