The Essential Features Of Utility Bill Software

By Nancy Gardner


One of the primary activities that municipalities are involved in is the charging and receiving of municipal rates and tariffs. It is unusual for a property in a town or city to be free of such charges. The local authority then needs to send bills to residents every month and also take the monies paid to them. Their utility bill software therefore needs to be able to handle these tasks.

In order to be successful, the software needs to satisfy some basic requirements. The issuing of the bills alone should satisfy several criteria. One of the most important of these is accuracy. There is a standing urban joke about how some people receive inaccurate municipal accounts. These typically refer to the astronomical figures that the bill displays, such as a power bill for millions of dollars. This is not, however, as much of a joke as it may seem.

Also, towns and cities are home to large populations, sometimes numbering several millions of people. This makes the municipal database of residents extremely large, so the software that is used should be able to accommodate a database of this size. These records are also being updated on a monthly basis, or at least continuously.

Another criterion is that the software should be able to detect and alert its users to non-payment. Non-payment is a perennial issue for municipalities. Indigent residents sometimes do not pay their accounts on time, or at all, and this is typically observed in the impoverished areas of the town or city. Then there are those residents who simply won't pay, for various reasons. Software that cannot pick up non-payment is useless.

The issue of the physical statements that are sent to the residents also arises. These should be acceptable to the residents. To start with, the bills need to reflect the linguistic make-up of the town or city. In some towns and cities, there is more than one language in use. The software should therefore be able to handle bilingualism, or even multilingualism, because the bills might be printed in more than one language, or they might be issued in different languages, depending on who they are being sent to.

Not everyone has the same level of literacy or education. Some people might be only partially literate, even though they are professional people or artisans. The fact that they are illiterate does not necessarily mean that they are impoverished or that they reside in the poorer areas of the town or city, or that they lack financial resources. In such cases, the bill should be easy to understand. Issuing paperwork to the entire population always involves this requirement and the software should be able to accommodate it.

The bill itself should be easy to analyze. It should have an open, simple layout that shows the important amounts and dates, even to a person who is not used to assessing such documents or who has a low level of literacy.

Non-payment and inaccurate statements are two of the serious problems that municipalities encounter in the issuing of their bills. Their software therefore needs to be consistent and accurate. It should also offer extreme ease of use, since in some cities it will have thousands of users and millions of records.




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