BY ADAM ATKINSON
North Country This Week

POTSDAM — Town board members have decided to phase out an antiquated QuickBooks system and seek a contract with an outside firm for new utility billing and municipal software.

Board members voted at their July 11 meeting to authorize Supervisor Ann Carvill to enter into an agreement with the national firm Edmonds GovTech, based in Northfield, NJ, for the new system for the clerk’s office.

Funds to pay for the system “are to be determined and brought back to the board for approval,” the resolution passed by the board said.

Edmonds GovTech develops and provides technology and software to serve local governments for things like utility billing operations, personnel, financial management, reports, HR and payroll.

Read more about them online at https://www.edmundsgovtech.com/ .

“It’s time to do things more properly that will really lessen an extraordinary amount of time spent on minutiae that only invites mistakes,” Carvill told the board during discussion.

Carvill said town officials had conferred with Edmonds representatives and that the transition process could be several months as town data is uploaded into the new system.

The supervisor plans to account for the system’s annual maintenance costs in the coming year’s budget.

Town Clerk Cindy Goliber told the board that she will soon have to begin billing for water and sewer fees, and that she had reached out to both Edmonds representatives and another firm, Williamson Law, a week ago about acquiring a new system to handle the pressing job. She said she had told them “time was of the essence” to get a new system online. The clerk said Edmonds contacted her the same day, while Williamson didn’t get back to her until July 10.

The town is still using QuickBooks to handle its bookkeeping and billing. The system, while cutting edge decades ago, is tedious to use and not efficient.

“The problem with QuickBooks is QuickBooks is not municipal software,” Goliber said.

The clerk said when the town opted years ago to use QuickBooks instead of a system specific to municipal bookkeeping, she had urged them to go with the latter.

“And I think we are finding more and more just a lot of glitches and things and room for error as Ann (Carvill) talked about before,” Goliber said.

Goliber said the estimated upfront cost of the new system for municipal software and the billing portions from Edmonds could be about $39,000 the first year and $18,500 the following years, which includes $1,000 per year for hosting in the Cloud. She said if the town purchased multiple systems to handle the different aspects that Edmonds can tackle, the hosting could be as much as $5,000.

Despite the several months upload time for all of the municipal software, Goliber said Edmonds representatives were confident the town’s current utility billing data could be moved over into the new system on a faster timetable.

“It’s funny that you are excited about this, because this was happening everywhere else 20 years ago,” joked Deputy Town Supervisor Marty Miller after the measure passed later in the meeting.

“I tried, I tried, I tried to get them to do this 20 years ago,” said Goliber.

“It’s like ‘Wow, the town of Potsdam is moving up,’” Miller said.

“We’re getting there,” said Town Councilwoman Allyssa Theobald Hardiman.

“Baby steps right?” Miller quipped.