Clayton County's Business Licensing Tech Sets the Bar High

• Industry: County
• Location: Clayton County, Georgia
• Number of Employees: 647
• Population: 297,100
• Tyler Client Since: 2017
• Tyler Products/Solutions Used: Enterprise Permitting & Licensing (powered by EnerGov), Enterprise ERP (powered by Munis), Payments, Cashiering

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Clayton County is a relaxed suburban community just minutes south of downtown Atlanta. The county has a neighborly, small-town feel but all the amenities of a major metropolitan area. Situated on one of the smallest land areas, Clayton County has been named as the sixth most densely populated county in Georgia.

Challenge

Effectively managing Clayton County’s healthy mix of business opportunities is essential due to the impact the licensing function has on economic development. The previous management strategy with broad business categories created difficulties with new business licensing applications, collecting fees and taxes, and license renewals. Staff and business owners needed easily configurable solutions to redefine business type categories and navigate the municipality’s unique processes to reduce errors. The complex nature of calculating late fees, alcohol, and excess taxes required robust coding capabilities. Varying business license expiration dates made tracking and initiating the renewal cycle with business owners challenging. Disjointed workflows hindered staff in processing applications, managing inspections, issuing, and renewing licenses.

Constituents spent a great deal of time applying in person and regularly chose the wrong application type, requiring a resubmittal and more time wasted. Clayton County needed a better way to manage commercial versus home-based businesses and various fees, the submission to issuance workflow, and track renewals based on an end-of-calendar-year expiration.

Solution

Increasingly cumbersome business licensing and renewal efforts prompted the organization to seek a better solution. As a Tyler Technologies client since 2017, county leaders chose Tyler’s Enterprise Permitting & Licensing Business Management application. This integrated platform provided the online and configuration capabilities they needed, plus, the ability to simplify complex processes. Digital technology improved their business licensing processes, streamlined, and strengthened the economic side of Clayton County’s community life.

Clayton County embraced digital workflows, open data access, and mobile technology. They used Tyler’s Enterprise Business Management solution to expand process capabilities across departments and extend process visibility to business owners. Project leaders leveraged software flexibility and application customization to manage licensing types better, accelerate issuance, and simplify renewals.

Results

The county reconfigured its business licensing into categories that made more sense. Their new configuration consisted of commercial businesses, dual and short-term rentals, and designated home-based as a different type. Jeremy Tisdell, business licenses manager of Clayton County Board of Commissioners Community Development, described one of the benefits of this change: “Separating a commercial from a home-based business helps with code enforcement.”

Clayton County leveraged the software’s code configuration capabilities using the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) codes to calculate and add fees for business licenses automatically. According to Tisdell, “Enterprise Permitting & Licensing picks up our codes to assess late fees, which automatically calculates and adds a 10% penalty with a 1.5% administration late fee, plus interest.”

Tisdell spoke about automating the licensing renewal process, “Online, we can verify that the information provided is correct, email the invoice, process their payment, and issue the license.” Automation simplified the process, took time and guesswork out of manual fee calculation, informed license holders of fee amounts, and provided an easier payment method.

The number of Clayton County’s license renewals was indicative of their thriving business community. They processed 4,400 business license renewals in 2022 and anticipate this trend to continue. The county is poised to grow and prosper with its virtual business licensing processes.