Council approves additional work for utility billing software migration after export problems with incumbent vendor

The City Council on Sept. 23 approved item 8W, authorizing additional time and consulting resources to complete a migration of the city’s utility billing system after repeated problems exporting clean customer and billing records from the incumbent vendor.

City staff told the council that the additional spending covers extra data-cleaning and testing cycles needed to avoid transferring corrupted or incomplete customer records into the new system. The project moved through two full test imports to date, staff said, and an additional full-import test is planned to ensure accurate billing data before cutover.

“We’ve had real difficulty getting a clean export out of our existing vendor, and the support to fix that,” the city manager said. “We’ve had to invest a lot more resources into cleaning that data up to make sure when it goes into the new software, we don’t create issues for our customers.”

Staff said the extra work stems from the current vendor’s inability to provide a dependable export in commonly usable formats, not from connectivity or network issues. The additional resources will be used for scripting, test imports and a side-by-side reconciliation process; staff expect the next clean full import to occur in November, contingent on cooperation from the outgoing vendor.

Councilman Mike Fisher had asked the item be pulled from the consent agenda for discussion and questioned who was at fault for the delay and cost increase. The city’s explanation was that shortcomings in the old software vendor’s export were the primary cause and that staff are acting to protect customers by ensuring clean data is imported into the new system.

The council approved the item as presented.