Key points

From time to time bloggers comment on the “six [or five or ten] key points” about software vendor selection.  Ignoring sticker shock (price) surely the principal element must be “does the vendor understand all of the elements of public sector billing?”.  Sadly many do not.  I reviewed a bespoke utility billing application recently where the billing side was world class.  It carried out some of the elements of interval billing in the energy market like nothing else I’ve seen.  However its designer knew nothing of double-entry book-keeping.  It’s incapable of producing reliably even the most basic entries for export to a general ledger.  It’s implemented, the bills are churning out, the customers are paying - and the utility has no idea, apart from money in the bank, how their business is faring.

This entry was posted on 2. August 2009 at 02:37 and is filed under vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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