Solution to Lodi’s billing system in the works

For those struggling with the City of Lodi’s online billing system, a solution is right around the corner. Last Wednesday the Lodi City Council gave authorization for the city to enter into a contract with Invoice Cloud.

According to Deputy City Manager Andrews Keys, the Invoice Cloud software will overlap the city’s Tyler Software to provide a new billing system. After several months of issues with the Tyler Software in reference to the billing system, the city staff felt that finding a third party vendor to overlap Tyler would be the best solution. The city had already invested a lot of money in Tyler and entirely scraping it would not be financially sound and would be difficult because the Tyler Software is being used for more than just its billing system. In addition to accepting payments from utility customers, the software is also used to create the city’s budget, handle payroll, make and receive payments related to dayto-day business, and produce annual financial reports.

“The billing system is the element of it, but the billing system is just a small piece of the package. It is a much larger system than just the utility billing,” City Manager Steve Schwabauer said in a previous report. “It handles payroll. It handles all of our accounts payable. It handles our annual financial report. It handles our budget. It handles our accountability systems and approval systems for employee purchases. It’s a big system. It’s not just the billing for water and wastewater and electricity.”

Keys said the hope is that the new third party software will rectify the issues with the billing system while still retaining Tyler for its other financial software services and saving the city money.

The city was forced to switch to Tyler last fall after the previous software system was no longer being serviced. Since then, the city has been having a number of issues with the Tyler Software in regards to the billing system. Customers complained of the software erroneously reporting late billing notices, and were also frustrated with the inability to sign up for reoccurring payments.

Some even had issues with setting up online accounts and those on billing plans had their bills fluctuate when they should have remained stagnant. Another issue was how the software handled e-checks. If a customer incorrectly typed the routing number from their check, Tyler would still send a payment confirmation saying that person paid, even though the error would cause the payment to fail.

Keys said once the contract for the third party software is signed the city will start the implementation process which should take up to120 days. He anticipates the software should be up and running before late October.