Thursday, August 20, 2015

Indispensable Aspects Of Utility Bill Software

By Nancy Gardner


Residents of towns and cities almost always have to pay municipal rates. There are very few property owners who are not subject to these charges. Monthly billing occupies a large amount of the municipality's productive time, and yet at the same time the local authority also has to keep tabs on whether or not residents are paying their bills. The utility bill software that the municipality uses to perform these functions therefore needs to be able to support the latter.

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.

Another factor is the sheer population of the residential area. A city can have literally millions of residents. Any database with that many files is going to need the magnitude of its population to be taken into account. The municipal software should be able to handle an enormous amount of entries, entries which are constantly updated.

Second, the issue of non-payment arises in some cases. This is a common problem in municipal accounting and as such the software should be able to handle it too. Some residents cannot pay, due to indigence, while others simply refuse to, for whatever reason they may have. If the software cannot reliably detect non-payment, it is obviously not suitable.

Concerning the actual physical paperwork, i. E. The bills that are sent to the residents, this should be acceptable to them. Where a town or city has a linguistically diverse population, the paperwork needs to be sensitive to that. Sometimes, a bill in more than one language is sufficient, but in other towns or cities it is necessary to issue the bills in more than one language, depending on the recipient. The software should be designed to include more than one language where this is an issue.

The literacy of the population is another factor that municipalities need to keep in mind. The level of literacy is not consistent across the entire population, so the paperwork should be issued in the simplest, most understandable language possible. It is not possible to assume that literacy is paired with area of residence either, since semi-literate or even illiterate people are not automatically residents of indigent suburbs or even financially compromised - they might have proper professional occupations. Literacy and universal comprehensibility are always criteria where documents are distributed to the entire population.

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.

Inaccuracies in statements are embarrassing to the municipality, and non-payment is a serious threat to the budget. Municipal software needs to address both of these issues. At the same time, the municipal administration presents it with thousands of users and millions of entries, so it should be as easy to use as possible.




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