City of Schopfheim

Decentralized invoicing reduces workloads

The city of Schopfheim, located in southwestern Baden-Württemberg, has been using integrated single-entry financial accounting from the newsystem product family since 2013. The municipal entities have been working with the double-entry version of newsystem since 2012.

Challenge

The city decided to use this blend of solutions partially due to Baden-Württemberg’s legal requirement that municipalities switch over to double-entry bookkeeping by 2020. Because of this, it was important to the city to use a system that supports both single-entry and double-entry approaches. Besides forward-thinking technologies, good functions and a Cash department payer system also played a key role in their decision.

Solution

Thanks to productive collaboration between officials from the city of Schopfheim and the Axians Infoma team, the launch process in 2012/2013 went according to plan and was completed within the set time frame. All taxes were assessed on time, and budget planning went according to schedule, since all modules were integrated quickly and seamlessly into productive operation.

There were some initial restrictions with regard to invoicing at the beginning, however, since the solution did not offer all the functions the city needed and had used in the past. Axians Infoma proved a professional partner in this instance – as it had throughout the entire project phase – and quickly made the needed adjustments.

Single-entry invoicing plays an important role in the city of Schopfheim’s portfolio of applications. A wide range of functions support a large number of municipal invoicing processes. Custom templates, services, and service categories were created to optimize these processes. Employees simply have to select the template they need for a process by clicking on it. The basic information is already saved in the system when the template is created, and only needs to be supplemented with updated values. Employees can select from defined, recurring services saved under the budget heading. This relieves personnel from routine work, while at the same time significantly speeding up the invoicing process. Since invoices are issued to recipients directly through recording in Infoma newsystem in a decentralized, single-entry system, duplicate entries can be avoided and redundant data eliminated. “Our employees quickly became familiar with operating the new system, since structures are clear and the invoicing model is very user friendly,” says Janine Kropf, who is responsible for servicing the invoicing module. Today, 57 Schopfheim city employees use the process.

Benefits

The positive collaboration on this project is also reflected in the city’s future plans for other solutions. The entire town administration will be switching over to double-entry bookkeeping in 2017. During this changeover, facilities and data from single-entry invoicing will be adopted into double-entry quick fee recording. This means the city doesn’t have to complete set up a second time, and functions will be available right from the start.