Needham advisory committee backs nearly $2 million for new town financial and billing system

The Technology Advisory Committee voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that Town Meeting approve a $1,999,995 appropriation to replace Needham’s aging financial and revenue software with an integrated, cloud-hosted system, committee members said.

Committee members said the purchase would consolidate the general ledger, purchasing, accounts payable, payroll and multiple revenue-billing systems (property tax, motor vehicle excise, water and sewer and miscellaneous billing), and pay for implementation services and a long-delayed archiving project to convert decades of records into searchable digital files.

David (staff member) said the committee is proposing a nearly $2 million request because the town’s current revenue and financial systems date back to much older products and have not met operational needs since an earlier vendor implementation. “We’re coming with a $2,000,000 request instead of what effectively was a couple hundred thousand,” David said, describing the higher up-front cost as driven largely by implementation fees and cloud hosting. The committee said roughly…