The vendor required to provide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, microsoft dynamics GP, is approaching end-of-life and will no longer meet the ongoing operational needs of the organization.
- The county seeks a replacement system that will:
• Fully support municipal-specific functions, including property tax billing, utility billing, and cash receipting, accounts receivable, accounts payable
• Streamline and modernize the budgeting process,
• Provide citizen self-service capabilities to improve transparency and access, and
• Enhance internal efficiency by reducing manual processes, improving reporting, and supporting integration across departments.
• Optionally, fixed assets – including asset retirement obligation.
- Objectives and outcomes
1. Internal outcomes include:
• Reducing manual processes across finance and administration,
• Streamlining the budgeting process to improve accuracy and timeliness, and
• Increasing efficiency and accuracy in property tax billing, utility billing, and cash receipting, and
• Improving overall staff efficiency through modern workflows and integrated tools.
2. Citizen-facing outcomes include:
• Providing residents with online access to property tax and utility accounts,
• Enabling online payment options for greater convenience, and
• Improving public access to records and related information.
- ERP system scope
1. In‑scope for initial go‑live:
• Core financials (GL, ap, AR, cash, bank reconciliation)
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Purchasing and approvals
• Property taxation
• Utilities
• Fixed assets
2. Stage‑two scope:
• Citizen and ratepayer portal
3. Out‑of‑scope:
• None beyond the scope delineated above.
• Vendors must treat any additional functionality as optional and price it separately.
4. Required integrations (quote as separate line items):
• GIS platform – data exchange and mapping integration
• Camelot (property information) – property data integration
• Budgeting – integration with Questica (current tool, currently being set up)
• Cemetery management – integration with current solution
- Current systems and architecture
1. Current core systems:
• ERP: microsoft dynamics GP with diamond municipal solutions add‑ons
• Budgeting: Questica (integrated with GP)
• GIS: in production.
• Currently in Esri
• Cemetery management: external product, separate from GP
2. Hosting, environments and security:
• Hosting model
• Identity and SSO and MFA expectations
• Canadian data residency and privacy requirements
• Target resilience, recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
3. Users and reporting:
• Estimated user counts (8 full users)
• Reporting tools in use – management reporter
- Current challenges and limitations
• E.g., manual processes in ap and bank reconciliation
• E.g., limited analytics and self‑service
• E.g., year‑end close effort and audit preparation
• E.g., training and user adoption
• E.g., data quality and duplicated entry
- Business drivers for change
• We are a small organization. We want to make sure the process is not overwhelming, and we are able to transition with minimal headaches
• Risk reduction and auditability
• Efficiency and automation (cycle time reductions; paperless processes)
• Transparency for council and citizens (timely reporting; self‑service)
• Cloud alignment and predictable total cost of ownership
- Assumptions, constraints, and dependencies
• Target go‑live window and blackout periods (e.g., taxation and utility billing cycles)
• Municipality resourcing: SMES for finance, taxation, utilities, GIS
• Data migration scope (masters and open items and historical years)
• I.e., how many years of data will we be importing, broken down by module.
• Accessibility, language, and privacy requirements.
- Technical requirements
1. Cloud architecture and hosting
• ERP solution shall be delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), fully hosted and managed by the vendor or its cloud partner.
• All data, backups, and disaster-recovery environments must be hosted entirely within country.
• The hosting environment shall reside on a tier-1 cloud platform with defined regions and documented failover procedures.
2. Security and privacy
• All data must be encrypted in transit and at rest (aes-256 or higher).
• The system shall support role-based access control (RBAC) and maintain complete audit logs exportable to the municipality.
• The solution must comply with act for the handling of personal information.
3. Identity and access management
• The solution must integrate with microsoft ENTRA id (azure active directory) or an equivalent identity provider using SAML 2.0 or OpenID connect for single sign-on.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) shall be enforced for all administrative and privileged accounts.
• Administrators must be able to assign granular permissions by user, role, and department.
4. Data protection, backup, and disaster recovery
• Provide automated daily backups with configurable retention and restore options.
• Documented incident-response and breach-notification procedures are required.
5. Interoperability and integrations
• The system shall support open, standards-based interfaces including rest and json APIs and webhook and event-driven integrations.
• Preferred integrations include:
o Provincial property-assessment data import for taxation
o Canadian banking eft and direct deposit formats for accounts payable, payroll, and pre- authorized payments;
o Asset-management systems such as citywide for capital-asset and work-order data exchange;
o Budgeting tools such as quest Ica through import and export or excel integration.
6. Environments and deployment
• Provide separate production and at least one non-production (test or training) environment.
• Configuration changes must be transferable between environments.
• System upgrades shall be completed with minimal downtime and include a defined rollback plan.
7. Performance and availability
• The solution must maintain a minimum 99.9 percent monthly uptime, excluding scheduled maintenance windows.
• Average response times for typical transactions must remain acceptable under normal municipal workloads.
• The environment must scale to accommodate fiscal-year, payroll, and taxation peaks.
8. Data migration and master data management
• The vendor shall supply tools or templates to map and load legacy data, including chart of accounts, vendors, customers, employees, and property rolls.
• Post-migration validation and reconciliation reports shall be provided to confirm data accuracy.
9. Reporting and analytics
• The system shall include a library of standard financial, payroll, and taxation reports and support ad-hoc report creation by authorized users.
• Reports must be schedulable and distributable through secure email or portal delivery.
• Audit trails shall capture user, timestamp, and before and after transaction details.
10. Accessibility and usability
• All user interfaces must comply with WCAG 2.1 level aa standards for accessibility.
• The application shall be browser-based, mobile-responsive, and optimized for field and remote users.
11. Configuration and extensibility
• Core functional requirements shall be met through configuration or supported extensions; no source-code modifications are permitted.
• All extensions must be upgrade-safe, fully documented, and version-controlled.
- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: January 23, 2026
