City of Auburn's Water Works Board will be updating its 10-12 year old software system of billing utilities. The implementation will become effective at the end of this month with the bills that are due in February 2013.
Updating the software aims to create more efficiency on both ends of the utility paying system.
Allison Edge, City of Auburn's assistant finance director, explained that the current software being used for the billing system works separately from accounting and financial software. This means that a large part of operating the system had to be manually done.
"The system we are going to is connected to the same software that our financial accounting software is," Edge said. "It's the same concept, but it's all connected to our other accounting software so that everything flows, and will take a lot less manual type entry."
This system update is not the first that Auburn's Water Works Board has seen.
"We've done some things over time. Just a couple of years ago, we went to a multi-cycle billing," said David Dorton, City of Auburn's Director of Public Affairs.
Dorton said that the AWWB used to function on one billing cycle for the month. The one billing cycle system caused personnel in revenue to have to work particularly strenuously during a small amount of time to serve citizens. With the multi-cycle billing system, that crunch period is now more spread out over time.
"The multi-cycle billing was a step, and now this software should help on our side and also for the citizens," Dorton said.
After the system is implemented, if a customer calls in with a question or complaint, Edge said it is going to be easier for the board to get to the information, and look at what they need to know to be able to help the customer.
The new system also hopes to make bill paying more efficient on the citizen's end. There will be more information available online, such as history on their water usage.
In the future, customers will still be able to pay their bills online, but will also now have the option of using an automated process by paying over the phone.
For citizens, this means more options with how they pay their bills.
"You can still get a bill, write a check, and it back, or the new software has an option to pay online," Dorton said. "Hopefully it'll be easier on folks."
With the new billing system comes some changes for citizens. Utility bills will look slightly different than before. Citizens will also be given new customer and account numbers that they will need to be able to utilize to pay utilities.
Maggie Waters, a local Auburn resident, is not too concerned about the change.
"I don't think it will be anything that will really bother us," Waters said. "I do always appreciate the convenience of automated payments, especially in the midst of already trying to remember so many other things in our day-to-day lives."
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