On July 7, the East Point City Council heard a presentation from city finance and IT staff about a planned migration of the city's BS&A enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from on‑premises servers to BS&A’s cloud platform. The city said the switch will require a scheduled blackout of the local BS&A system beginning July 16, with most modules going live July 20 and customer‑care functions coming back online July 22.

City finance director Shannon Golden told the council the briefing was prompted by questions the budget and finance committee raised in June and was intended to make the full council aware of the timeline and service impacts.

The migration matters to residents because the city will not be able to accept or process payments through usual channels during the conversion. “We won't be able to accept payments via mail, in person, online, over the phone, or at our kiosk,” Michelle Adams of Customer Care said, describing a temporary suspension of many customer‑facing payments and account changes.

Why it matters: City staff said the cloud version will reduce on‑site hardware maintenance, provide automatic updates, and improve security and disaster recovery. Oliver Brown of the city's IT team described the current system as “a server based product, meaning we have to maintain all the hardware on premise,” and said moving to the cloud should reduce downtime and IT maintenance costs.

Council members pressed staff for details about resident impacts and cost savings. Brown said the city expects annual IT maintenance and support savings of roughly $75,000 once the migration is complete. Staff also said payroll and accounts‑payable transactions must be completed before the blackout: payroll and the mid‑month check run must be entered by July 15 because “nothing can be entered into the system from the 16th to the 20th.”

Customer‑care and billing details: City staff gave a list of specific billing cycles that will be affected and a schedule for mailing. The electric department said meter reads will continue to be collected by the automatic metering infrastructure (AMI) and held until BS&A is available to ingest them; the city will request and upload the stored reads after the cloud conversion. Councilmember Cummings confirmed that reads will be retained during the outage and applied when the system resumes.

To limit harm to customers, staff said the city will not assess late fees or issue disconnect notices during the blackout period and will not assess penalties through the end of July; Michelle Adams said, “We will not ... assess any late penalties or late fees on the customer's account during this time period.” The city has been distributing notices via utility bills, the city website, mass email and social media, and staff said they will provide additional outreach to apartment managers and large landlords.

Training and risk: Staff described a condensed training schedule during the conversion window and on‑site vendor support after go‑live. Council members asked about privacy and security; Brown said BS&A’s cloud offering provides enhanced security, threat monitoring and redundancy compared with a 17‑year‑old on‑premises installation.

Short‑term operational notes: Staff advised that customer‑initiated new service requests and transfers will not be possible during the blackout. Staff said online account setup functionality is expected to be available within months after go‑live. The city also will confirm how automatic (autopay) payments are handled during the conversion and notify customers before the conversion begins.

Staff said the migration is intended to be an IT modernization step, not a permanent service disruption, and council members asked staff to provide a detailed cost‑savings breakdown and the mapping of which neighborhoods fall in which billing cycles before the migration begins.

Ending: The council received the report as informational; no formal vote was required. Staff said they will continue outreach to residents and provide the additional financial and cycle‑mapping details requested by council members.