Billing and Customer Relation Management Software

The vendor required to provide billing system and customer relationship management (CRM) software system must be able to input meter data and accurately calculate, generate, and distribute service bills.
- Requirements
1. Merchant services payment processor requirements
•    The solution should preferably integrate with the city’s existing merchant processors. 
•    In preferential order: invoice cloud, Tyler payments, forte, USAE pay and MyGov pay.
•    Annual certificate of insurance submission required which demonstrates insurance coverage of:
o    Minimum general liability coverage of $1m per occurrence and $2m aggregate. 
o    Cyber liability coverage of at least $5m, with preference for vendors offering $10m. 
o    The city of must be named as an additional insured.
•    Merchant processor shall each maintain current compliance with the payment card industry (PCI) data security standard (DSS) and shall provide annual evidence as follows (listed in order of preference):
o    Attestation of compliance (AOC) issued by a qualified security assessor; or 
o    Listing on the visa global registry of service providers; or 
o    Self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) of the appropriate type with supporting documentation.
•    Credit card processing fees must be applied as a monthly debit charge rather than deducted from daily deposits. 
•    Ability to enable or disable passing along of processing fees to the customer. 
•    Vendor shall identify whether it stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data. 
•    If any cardholder data is handled, vendor must validate compliance annually and on demand by the city. 
•    City reserves right to terminate contract for PCI DSS noncompliance or data breach.
- Billing and rate management
•    Support multi-service, multi-rate billing, including electric, geothermal, and the ability to add additional utilities in the future if desired.
o    Sustainable energy utility (SEU) will go live with electric billing and anticipates expanding to geothermal within 2 years. 
o    Additional utilities remain to be determined.
•    Support a variety of rate structures, including flat, tiered, seasonal, and unit-based rates.
o    SEU anticipates a straightforward rate structure upon initial implementation but the software must be able to accommodate more complicated rate structures as the program grows.
•    Support specialized programs and adjustments, including:
o    Budget billing plans.
o    On-bill financing.
o    Deposits, refunds, and arrears workflows.
o    Ability to levy late fees and penalties.
o    Write-offs and adjustments with reason codes and audit trail.
o    Low-income discounts and credits.
o    Ability to accept partial, over and pre-payments. 
o    Ability to pro-rate charges based on connection dates or final billing. 
o    Ability to configure and manually add miscellaneous fees in addition to rate-based fees. 
o    Ability to configure fees to automatically charge based on pre-set actions such as shut-off, service, etc.
•    Ability to configure automated alerts to staff to review prior to bill issuance, triggered by high usage or billing exceptions.
•    Bills must support branding, custom messages by bill batch, multi-page layouts, multilingual support, and act-compliant templates.
•    Support dunning tiers, configurable overdue notices, integrated payment arrangements, and shutoff holds.
•    Ability to view and report on historical billing rate changes and revisions.
•    Ability to view and reprint past bills.
•    Ability to export bills to a third-party printer.
•    Ability to flag invoices as sent to tax roll and no longer due.
- Customer experience and account (CRM) management
•    Customer notifications (email, SMS, letters) must be configurable and event driven (e.g., due soon, past due, high usage, move-in and out) as well as manually triggerable (both in bulk and individually). 
•    Ability to attach files to customer account, property, or invoice within software UI. 
•    Ability to view communication log and history within property and customer accounts. 
•    Ability to track a customer connection date separately from meter and service connection dates. 
•    Ability to add and customize user defined fields that can be utilized as needed.
- Lead the implementation process in an efficient and timely manner
•    Provide a detailed project plan with milestones, change management strategy, role-based training, testing criteria, cutover plan, and Hypercare support. 
•    Ensure implementation timeline meets the targeted go-live date of September 2026. 
•    Conduct training sessions for city of staff. 
•    Provide training resources for ongoing training and new hires.
- Ongoing customer support
•    Assign a dedicated customer support representative for the city’s account. 
•    provide regularly scheduled routine account check-in meetings with city of, customer service, and IT staff. 
•    Define SLA commitments, including response and resolution times for different types of issues or interruptions. 
•    Statement on after-sales technical support to keep the software up to date, patched, and with desired features added in the future.
- Budget: $10,000

- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: December 9, 2025