Municipal governments are showing strong interest in purchasing automated remittance solutions, and it appears that the sluggish economy -- and its impact on municipal budgets -- is the primary reason, according to Tony Rapaglia, regional manager for Creditron (trapaglia@creditron.com). Municipalities are looking to automate functions such as tax and utility payment processing, Rapaglia explains, adding that he expects the strong demand to carry over into the new year.
"Especially after the recent elections, municipalities are extremely conscious about the amount of money they are spending on back-office functions such as remittance processing," Rapaglia says. "Many are focused like a laser-bean on cutting costs and improving service to taxpayers. They recognize that they can pass along any savings from more efficient processing to their taxpayers."
So why is remittance processing, in particular, getting so much attention from municipalities?
For starters, Rapaglia notes that automated remittance processing frees up municipal workers to focus on other activities -- which is critical as they look to become more taxpayer-focused and make do with less staff. Automated remittance processing also helps municipalities make deposits much quicker, delivering immediate gains in funds availability. Even greater gains are on tap for those municipalities that deposit items electronically to their banks via Check 21. And municipalities are drawn to the improved security that an automated remittance system provides compared to paper processes. "In an automated environment, less people handle the checks, and there's less opportunity to lose them," Rapaglia explains, noting a recent case where a courier misplaced paper checks.
"Municipal budgets are certainly tight, but more of them are recognizing that they can achieve big savings by spending relatively little money on an automated remittance system," Rapaglia concludes.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Press Release - Creditron Wins Contract from Summit County Treasurer's Office to Deploy Image-Enabled Payments Solution
TORONTO, ON - Creditron, a leading provider of payments processing and receivables management solutions, today announced that the Treasurer's Office of Summit County, Utah, implemented Creditron's ItemAge Express platform to automate the processing of the county's tax payments. By eliminating manual processes with the Creditron platform, the county is significantly accelerating the processing of paper-based tax payments and reducing operations costs.
Part of the Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area, and host of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Summit County is so named because it includes 39 of the highest mountain peaks in Utah. In fact, the county has the second-highest mean elevation above sea level of any county outside of Colorado.
Creditron provided Summit County with ItemAge Express, the company's flagship image-enabled payments processing solution. Most of the county's tax payments include a check and remittance stub with an optical character recognition (OCR) scan-line that includes the taxpayer's account number and amount due. ItemAge Express has greatly enhanced the county's processing of its tax payments, resulting in increased staff productivity and improved operations efficiency, in turn, helping the county reduce employee overtime. The Creditron solution also has enabled the county to make its bank deposits over two-and-a-half hours earlier each day, delivering improvements in float.
"Taxpayers are rightfully concerned about government spending," said Summit County Treasurer Michael Howard. "Deploying the Creditron solution for automating the processing of tax payments is part of the county's ongoing efforts to shrink costs and improve service to our taxpayers."
The county's solution includes modules for courtesy and legal amount recognition (CAR/LAR) for personal and business checks, image and data storage and retrieval, and hot files to automatically stop processing of flagged accounts. The solution also includes Creditron's unique Image Data Completion (IDC) module, which streamlines the handling of exceptions. Howard said the tools in ItemAge Express for identifying and reconciling out-of-balance transactions -- particularly the ability to view images of checks and related stubs side-by-side -- has delivered significant efficiency gains.
Additionally, ItemAge Express automatically uploads payments information to the county's customer information system from Tyler Technologies -- a key reason the county selected Creditron as its payments processing solutions provider. "Creditron was the only payments processing solution that interfaced with our Tyler accounting package," Howard explained. "This was important because we wanted to be able to upload batches without having to do any custom coding or intermediate steps."
The solution runs on a Smartsource Professional scanner from Burroughs Payment Systems.
"The implementation of the Creditron solution was smooth," Howard noted. "We also were very impressed with their on-site rep who took the time to understand our workflows and requirements." In the future, Summit County plans to deploy Creditron's Check 21 solution, which allows for the electronic deposit of payments, eliminating trips to the bank and possibly speeding funds availability.
"The economic downturn has put tremendous pressure on government entities to improve operations efficiency and accelerate cash flow," said Creditron Founder and CEO Wally Vogel. "By deploying an image-enabled payments solution, Summit County not only will achieve these objectives, but it also will have the tools to better serve its constituents. It's for these reasons that we continue to see strong demand from government entities for our image-enables payments processing solutions."
Part of the Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area, and host of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Summit County is so named because it includes 39 of the highest mountain peaks in Utah. In fact, the county has the second-highest mean elevation above sea level of any county outside of Colorado.
Creditron provided Summit County with ItemAge Express, the company's flagship image-enabled payments processing solution. Most of the county's tax payments include a check and remittance stub with an optical character recognition (OCR) scan-line that includes the taxpayer's account number and amount due. ItemAge Express has greatly enhanced the county's processing of its tax payments, resulting in increased staff productivity and improved operations efficiency, in turn, helping the county reduce employee overtime. The Creditron solution also has enabled the county to make its bank deposits over two-and-a-half hours earlier each day, delivering improvements in float.
"Taxpayers are rightfully concerned about government spending," said Summit County Treasurer Michael Howard. "Deploying the Creditron solution for automating the processing of tax payments is part of the county's ongoing efforts to shrink costs and improve service to our taxpayers."
The county's solution includes modules for courtesy and legal amount recognition (CAR/LAR) for personal and business checks, image and data storage and retrieval, and hot files to automatically stop processing of flagged accounts. The solution also includes Creditron's unique Image Data Completion (IDC) module, which streamlines the handling of exceptions. Howard said the tools in ItemAge Express for identifying and reconciling out-of-balance transactions -- particularly the ability to view images of checks and related stubs side-by-side -- has delivered significant efficiency gains.
Additionally, ItemAge Express automatically uploads payments information to the county's customer information system from Tyler Technologies -- a key reason the county selected Creditron as its payments processing solutions provider. "Creditron was the only payments processing solution that interfaced with our Tyler accounting package," Howard explained. "This was important because we wanted to be able to upload batches without having to do any custom coding or intermediate steps."
The solution runs on a Smartsource Professional scanner from Burroughs Payment Systems.
"The implementation of the Creditron solution was smooth," Howard noted. "We also were very impressed with their on-site rep who took the time to understand our workflows and requirements." In the future, Summit County plans to deploy Creditron's Check 21 solution, which allows for the electronic deposit of payments, eliminating trips to the bank and possibly speeding funds availability.
"The economic downturn has put tremendous pressure on government entities to improve operations efficiency and accelerate cash flow," said Creditron Founder and CEO Wally Vogel. "By deploying an image-enabled payments solution, Summit County not only will achieve these objectives, but it also will have the tools to better serve its constituents. It's for these reasons that we continue to see strong demand from government entities for our image-enables payments processing solutions."
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