In this iNovah Case Study how Dakota County, Minnesota, partnering with System Innovators, moved from a decentralized and confusing reconciliation process to streamlined efficiency.
Summary
Home to 414,686 people, 35 taxation districts, and 46 business units, Dakota County faced complex challenges to process, manage, and reconcile incoming revenue data. In 2008, the County adopted the iNovah Enterprise Revenue Management (ERM) and Cashiering solution across 12 departments. This enabled the County to consolidate multiple source systems, streamline operational procedures, reduce manual errors, and provide data integrity and transparency across the enterprise.
Challenges
Dakota County was manually tracking 336,340 annual transactions to update the general ledger. The county had separate dedicated terminals to process credit cards, a storage facility to retain paper records, and was manually balancing multiple cash drawers. These time intensive processes risked daily accuracy, deposit and reconciliation errors, and was unable to effectively research customer service issues. Dakota County’s main objectives were to streamline manual business practices, “get money to the bank” faster and safer, and simplify end-of-day balancing practices for cashiers and supervisors.
Solution
In 2008, Dakota County partnered with System Innovators to implement iNovah Enterprise Revenue Management (ERM) to reduce manual processing errors, provide enterprise-wide reporting, create process flow management, and simplify cash drawer balancing.
“iNovah was our answer. It gives us a centralized receipting and revenue management platform that’s easy use, friendly to work with and does a great job integrating with all of our applications!”
Rosalee McCready, Systems Analyst for Dakota County
Implementation
System Innovators’ staff worked closely with Dakota County to roll out iNovah across each of its 12 departments, starting with Taxation. iNovah’s flexibility enabled the County to successfully integrate applications such as OneSolution, ONBase, Direct Pay, FIDLAR, HBC Financial, ACI, and other in-house systems.
Results
Since implementing iNovah, Dakota County has ability to consolidate revenue from all payment channels and streamline front office and back office activities. The County now utilizes one interface to process and track all payments through iNovah, providing citizens with flexibility to pay multiple fees and permits in real-time from one location. iNovah’s 360 degree real-time financial reporting eliminates the risk of processing errors while providing transaction research capability. The solution also eliminates the financial costs and time associated with storage facilities overrun by boxes of retained records. End-of-day processing, general ledger updates, cash drawer balancing, and financial batch management have been simplified by replacing the existing system with 100 cashier and administrative iNovah workstations. Through this, iNovah becomes the hub for all revenue collection.
iNovah helps create operational efficiencies, increases transparency through reporting, and processes revenue quickly and securely. The County’s continued success with iNovah will reach to future projects, including and implementation of iNovah in the Sheriff’s department and enabling online permitting.
