Top-Off is the family-side companion app for Fortress-equipped facilities. Friends and family use it to send money to an inmate’s trust account in seconds — funding phone calls, commissary orders, gift baskets, and tablet services. No money order, no in-person kiosk, no third-party deposit vendor charging eight dollars to send twenty. Top-Off lives at fortressdms.app — a dedicated consumer surface separate from the staff portal.
What it does
- Lets a family member search for an inmate by facility + name (or PIN), enter a deposit amount, choose a payment method (Apple Pay, credit/debit card, or bank transfer), and confirm the deposit in a single screen.
- Posts the deposit to the inmate’s trust ledger within sixty seconds — the inmate sees the new balance on their Offender Tablet immediately and can use it to place a call or commissary order on the spot.
- Charges a flat low-cost service fee — designed for affordability, not vendor margin. Compare with $7.95-$11.95 fees on legacy deposit kiosks.
- Supports recurring weekly or monthly deposits with auto-renewal, so families can set up a steady stream of phone-call funding without having to remember to log in.
- Sends a receipt email to the depositor and an in-tablet notification to the inmate, both with the deposit amount and the new trust balance.
How it works
Top-Off authenticates the depositor via a lightweight email + phone-confirmation flow (no jail-facing account required), looks up the inmate against the facility roster, and submits the payment through the facility’s merchant account. On settlement, the deposit posts to the trust ledger as a credit tagged with the Top-Off transaction id. Failures are reported back to the depositor with a plain-English reason — declined card, insufficient funds, address verification mismatch — so the depositor can correct and retry without calling a 1-800 number or driving to a kiosk.
Top-Off is the consumer-side app — distinct from the Fortress JMS staff portal. It’s mobile-first, designed to be used from a phone in three minutes, and supports Spanish in addition to English. Deposits made through Top-Off are reconciled against the facility’s merchant account and appear in the same trust ledger that funds phone calls, commissary orders, and gift baskets. The same balance the inmate sees on their tablet is the balance the family sees in the Top-Off app — there’s no lag, no separate sub-account, no “your deposit will appear within 72 hours” message.
For facilities running on the Fortress staff portal already, no integration work is required — Top-Off connects via the existing trust ledger API, the existing inmate roster service, and the existing merchant processor configuration. A new facility going live with Fortress IPS and Commissary gets Top-Off in the same week, with the same go-live script.
Data captured
- Per deposit: inmate id, depositor name + email, amount, payment method, transaction id, posted timestamp (UTC).
- Recurring schedule (if set): frequency, next-charge date, max-charge cap, cancellation event log.
- Audit: failed attempts with the carrier reason, compliance-screening result, settlement timestamp.
- PCI-scoped payment data lives only in the merchant processor; Fortress stores tokenized references plus last-4 digits.
Compliance & retention
Top-Off is PCI DSS scoped through the same merchant processor used by Gift Baskets. Deposit records follow the facility’s accounting retention (typically seven years). Refunds happen as explicit credit transactions; reversals against the inmate’s trust balance run through the same audited ledger pattern as every other money movement in the system. AML / OFAC screening runs on the depositor for any single deposit at or above the BSA threshold; recurring-deposit caps are configurable per facility.
Privacy posture: Top-Off collects the minimum data needed to post a deposit — depositor name, email, payment instrument, and the inmate identifier. There is no marketing list, no data sale, no third-party tracker. The cookie footprint is limited to session and CSRF. The privacy policy and terms of service are linked from the app footer.
We switched to a similar web-based deposit portal about eight months ago and the reduction in lobby traffic alone was worth it — staff aren’t spending half their shift processing cash deposits at the window anymore. Does fortressdms.app send an automatic receipt or confirmation text to the family member after the transaction posts? That’s the one thing our current vendor still hasn’t figured out.
We’ve been dealing with family members showing up at the window with cash for years and it creates a real headache for our booking staff. Does the deposit post automatically to the inmate’s account or does someone on our end still have to approve it before it’s visible in the JMS? That approval step could be a dealbreaker for us if it slows things down during a busy intake shift.
We’ve been using a third-party kiosk service for years and the fees families pay are outrageous — going to push this one up to our sheriff this week. One question: does the deposit still post immediately if the inmate was just moved to a different housing unit, or does it hold until the transfer is confirmed in the system?
We switched to a similar system about eight months ago and the difference in lobby traffic alone was worth it — family members used to line up at the window every weekend just to drop off cash. Curious whether fortressdms flags deposits over a certain threshold automatically for compliance review, or if that’s a manual process on our end.
We switched to a similar instant-deposit setup about eight months ago and the difference in lobby traffic alone was worth it — families used to line up on Fridays just to hand over cash. Quick question though: does the family member get any kind of receipt or confirmation email they can use if there’s a dispute about a deposit that didn’t post correctly?
We switched to a similar system about eight months ago and the difference in lobby traffic alone was worth it — families were constantly lining up at the window just to put $20 on an account. Does the posted balance update reflect in your JMS in real time, or is there still a batch sync happening behind the scenes?