Scalable Solutions Connect a Growing City
August 10, 2023 by Peter Friesen
Payments, finances, and budgeting are the backbone of local government. Without useful data and systems, financial accuracy suffers, and governments can struggle to identify efficiencies.
The city of Grovetown, Georgia, saw how an aging financial solution negatively affected their employees and residents. Switching to a modern, cloud-based solution offered numerous benefits, and empowered the city to reshape its payment and budgeting setup.
Growing City, Aging System
Grovetown’s legacy solution worked well before it stopped receiving updates in 2014. This required the nine finance employees to spend several years entering data manually from other portals and resolving user complaints for utility or other public payments.
“Due to the potential for error, omissions, and lost documentation in manual entry, the financial information in the old system wasn’t always reliable,” Staff Accountant Kristal Singletary said.
These challenges, along with issues on the public-facing side of the solution, stressed the nine-person finance department. They dealt with occasional delays in posted payments, which could trigger a late payment penalty or utility shutoff, even though a resident’s payment was made. A lack of self-service options meant there was lots of staff time spent helping users with basic questions. The legacy solution was clearly not the way forward for a growing city of about 17,000.
Finding the Way Forward
Grovetown soon found an ideal new solution, which was cloud-hosted through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) contract. These details were especially important for a smaller municipality that works with a limited budget. Not only would the new solution save staff time, but it would also help the finance department analyze their own data to locate cost savings. The stability of a SaaS contract makes for more predictable budgeting as well.
“By moving to a fully digital ERP system, the city achieved more organized and accessible records as well as utility billing management,” Singletary said.
Public Satisfaction
The solution has improved satisfaction outside of city hall, with more accessible online tools and a wider range of self-service payment options, which has doubled the amount of virtual payments the city receives. It also processes payments instantly — ending the headache of misapplied late fees or utility stoppages.
Grovetown’s accounting staff now send out fewer paper checks for vendor payments, with over half of the payments automated via direct deposit or other transfer systems.
“Overall, the implementation has enabled the city to become more transparent and compliant with regulations, while still providing excellent customer service,” Singletary said.
A cloud-based ERP system gives Grovetown the ability to scale as they need, adding data storage or other programs as operational needs change. Employees can access financial data from anywhere using secure sign-ons to approve processes or double-check numbers without having to head into the office.
Connecting the Community
As Grovetown improves its internal and public-facing processes, they’ve seen how community relations and satisfaction has increased. The new solution gives residents better control over their accounts and billing. It also works in conjunction with a mobile application, which allows residents to directly reach city departments with issues such as pothole repair or garbage pickup.
“This solution not only improves customer satisfaction and transparency, but also aligns with our specific vision and goals as we continue to move into the 21st century,” Singletary said.