vendredi 29 janvier 2016

Indispensable Aspects Of Utility Bill Software

By Nancy Gardner


It is very rare for erven in an urbanized area not to be charged municipal rates and taxes. This constitutes one of the main activities of the municipal authority, and bills are sent to residents on a monthly basis. They also need to be able to monitor the payment of these bills. The utility bill software that is used by the municipality can play a part in the success or failure of this process.

There are some indispensable characteristics that the software should have in order to be effective in the municipality's administration. Even the first stage of the billing process, which is the issuing of the actual paper bills, presents some simple requirements to the administration and, in turn, to the software that they use. One of these is accuracy. The standard off-hand wise-crack about the municipal account that shows a million-dollar water bill is not as humorous as it may sound.

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.

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.

Third, the software needs to allow its users to produce paperwork that is appropriate to the local residents. Some urban settlements are home to more than one language. This should be accommodated through the use of bilingual bills, or bills issued in the language of a specific resident's area. The software should be able to handle more than one language where this is required.

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 actual physical statement has its own requirements. A person who seldom reads such documents, or who is not literate, should be able to identify the important figures on it, and also the dates. This implies that it should be easy to assess, with a simplified layout.

Municipalities need a reliable and accurate software system for their billing administration. Non-payment is a thorny issue that causes severe emotional responses, at times, and the issuing of inaccurate bills is another. The software that the municipality uses to issue the bills should be easy to use for a system that has as many as millions of entries and thousands of users.




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