The City of Stuart, Florida, creates its own utility billing solution.

• Author: Boglioli, Louis J., III

Surprisingly, one of the most overlooked and underemphasized aspects of any system is its reporting capabilities--until the reports from the system are not adequate to meet the demands of the users, at which point reporting can become critical. The most important reporting function of a utility is the bill it sends to its customers. When the City of Stuart, Florida, made changes that created unexpected problems with its utility billing, the city had to develop a solution quickly and inexpensively The answer in this case was to put something together in-house.

BACKGROUND

The City of Stuart, a small coastal city in Martin County, provides police, fire, and most other general municipal services, along with utility services: award-winning water, water reclamation, residential and commercial sanitation, yard trash collection, recycling, and storm water maintenance. Though the city uses third-party products for the actual meter reading and some work order functions, the remainder of the billing, receipting, collections, and meter maintenance is handled by an enterprise resource planning system that is tightly integrated with the receipting and accounting modules. The system is designed with a common database of service locations and addresses for all the modules, as well as a common listing of customers. The ERP system uses tables in a unified database structure to maintain customer information--services, history, rates, consumption and usage, and all the related financial data pertaining to their accounts. The system even generates ACH payment information and all the journal entries that interface with the accounting module of the system, and prints customers' utility bills.

The city's ERP system offers many features and handles almost every aspect of its operations, in one way or another. It includes a wide array of reports and even allows users to generate some custom reports, manipulate the standard reports provided, and save almost every report as an exported text file. Users can extract information, rearrange the layout of the reports produced, and combine reports to bring together information from the outside. The only area where these features are not available is on those reports, or forms, that are not normally meant to be manipulated, such as accounts payable checks, payroll checks, and, of course, utility bills.

Stuart's constant goal is to provide excellent services to its customers and citizens, as well as excellent customer service. Over the years there had been some...