Lodi looks for ways to fix billing frustration

Ever since the launch of a new billing system this past fall, Lodi council members, city staff and citizens alike have been frustrated by the new utility billing software.

“This affects people on a regular basis,” Councilwoman JoAnne Mounce said during Tuesday morning’s shirtsleeve session. “They try to pay their bills every single month and they have trouble every single month. This kind or stuff just outrages the community on a monthly basis.”

The most frustrating part about the software issues is that when they were initially sold on the concept, council members were told the city could customize the software, Mounce said. But Tyler, the current software system, has fallen short of what was promised, she said.

“The fact that they can’t (do that) just really burns my french fries, because that’s a million-dollar program, and they sat here and told us that it could do that,” Mounce said. “And now we are where we are.”

Staff is working diligently on finding a “bolt-on product” that can be used with Tyler, City Manager Steve Schwabauer.

“Replacing Tyler — which is such a massive system that operates almost everything we do — isn’t really an option at this point, but we have found a product that we’re pretty happy with so far,” Schwabauer said.

“It’s going to take some due diligence, which is the phase that we’re in right now — following up with other cities who have Tyler and use this product to make sure that it works over top of Tyler seamlessly,” he said.

Schwabauer said he wants the public to be aware that the city’s software package facilitates more than just the city’s billing system.

“I think they’re people that imagine that Tyler is just our online billing system,” Schwabauer said. “We have a very large financial systems information package.”

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 day-to-day business, and produce annual financial reports.

“It does a lot more than just this small element of it that’s not working well which is the online payment protocol for our customers,” Schwabauer said.

The old billing software fit the city’s needs for electric utility customers, but the company that created it was no longer offering support, he said. He compared it to a cellphone that can no longer be updated; eventually, it becomes useless because the software isn’t compatible with apps or websites anymore, he said.

“It’s not just a matter of saying, ‘Hey, throw out this multimillion-dollar system and start all over again,’” Schwabauer said. “That’s a complicated thing to do with such a large system and so much invested with it, based on (just) one element of it being a failure. That’s why we’re are looking into a different solution.”

Such a solution may have been found. If purchased, Icloud — a “bolton” program with no association to Apple — could serve as the payment portal and would communicate with Tyler, allowing it to enter information into the city’s larger system. Icloud would provide a portal that makes more sense to the end user — city customers, Schwabauer said.

Icloud has more features than Tyler offered, he added.

One of the problems the city has had with Tyler is with how it handles e-checks, Schwabauer said. If a customer miss-types the routing number from their check, Tyler will still send a payment confirmation saying that person paid, even though the error would cause the payment to fail, Schwabauer said.

Icloud doesn’t prevent this issue, but it has some protections to make it less likely to happen, he said.

“It’s also just a system that is easier to read, easier to see and understand than the Tyler platform, and it also allows you to do recurring credit card payments, which Tyler doesn’t allow,” Schwabauer said.

Tyler won’t store credit card numbers because identity theft laws require a certain protocol that the software doesn’t have, he said. Icloud has this protocol in place.

City staff is looking into the cost of Icloud, researching whether or not there it will address all of the problems they’ve had with Tyler, and reaching out to other cities that use Tyler and Icloud together to see whether the fix worked. Staff will also be looking at the other aspects of the software system to see if they would need to use Icloud for other areas, he said.

Schwabauer did not pinpoint an exact cost for the software, but it would cost the city less than they’re paying currently, he said. He also said that it was too early to answer whether or not the city would be seeking reimbursement for failed software or funds for Icloud from Tyler.