What six councils told us about income management reporting
On 29 July we discussed Local Gov IMS’s reporting and asked six councils about what's working (or not) with their income management and payment systems. Read what came up or watch our highlight video.
A warm thank you to Burnley, Rotherham, Warrington, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Yorkshire and Gloucester City, for joining us.
Watch the highlights:
What came up
Every morning starts with the daily reconciliation check. The bank says one number and the system says another. When they match, everyone gets on with their day, but when they don't, someone loses a morning working out why. Councils want it to take seconds, and they want to go from the total straight down to the transaction causing the problem.
Nobody wants to run a report manually at 8am. Councils want reports that run overnight, or that land in the inbox before the office opens. And when a query comes in three years later, they need the figure as it stood back then.
Some legacy IMS system's day ends at midnight but the council's day doesn't. Most run to about 7pm. So, the daily numbers never quite line up with the daily work. We're adding configurable day boundaries, so you can align your reporting with your operational day, whether that ends at 6pm, 8pm or later.
Some councils want to build fully custom reporting themselves while others want it handed over, finished. Our API is fully open, so you can build your own reports in tools like Power BI, or use our flexible product embedded dashboards.
Today you can see that someone paid by card, but you can't see whether they paid on the website, over the phone, or at a kiosk. The data is already there so we are adding this functionality, first via the API and then in the embedded dashboards.
What happens next
All of these findings will feed the development of Local Gov IMS. Two things we're also updating: what happens when someone pulls a very large export, and how permissions should work across both the dashboards and the API.
Come to the next one
We run webinars often and we welcome everyone there. Learn about how Local Gov IMS can help your council and help shape the product to be exactly as you need it to be.
Our business model is about both building community and providing technology for the public good. We are building our tech with you at the heart of it.
Find the next webinar on the resources page or follow us on LinkedIn where we run our promotions.
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