HeyGov Case Study: Digital Transformation for the City of Mineral Point

The City of Mineral Point is a city boasting just over 2,500 residents in Iowa county, Wisconsin. This city is said to be the third oldest in the state of Wisconsin with the first settlers arriving in 1827. The area carried importance due to the discovery of zinc and lead early on. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Context

1. The City of Mineral Point has a lot of payments. Ranging from high volume payments like utility bills and dog licenses, but also high dollar bills like property taxes.
2. The city offers four park shelters that are regularly used for events and gatherings. 
3. Due to the size and the number of payments that are handled by the municipality, various departments are involved in processing the different departments. It was important to the municipality to streamline the process and offer transparency to all staff members of the process. 

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The HeyGov Solution

The municipality required a full solution to transform and streamline all their current processes taking some paper based and some online processes to a comprehensive system of digital forms, licenses and payments. Utility bill payments were the most important, as it took up a lot of human resources to manually reconcile the utility bills. Utility bills are high volume payments. Bills are emailed to all residents monthly. When everything was cash or check, it took a lot of time each month to process, reconcile and make bank runs.

HeyGov created two sections within the citizen payment portal to process online payments. One for Account numbers and one for their Address.

The City of Mineral Point required an online payment solution that integrates with their accounting software. Manual reconciliation, although the norm, is very time consuming. The municipal clerk and treasurer explained to us that in a regular billing cycle, manual reconciliation can take up to eight hours! During the auditing process, this timeline can become 3-5 days.

Due to this need for streamlining their workload HeyGov provides a full two-way syncing integration with the City’s accounting and utility billing system, Workhorse. Mineral Point now has a process in place for utility bill payments using HeyGov and reconciliation with Workhorse. Here is how it works with HeyGov:

1. Workhorse’s utility billing software contains the list of account numbers and the amount due for each billing cycle
2. Within Workhorse, the clerk exports the utility bills into HeyGov.
3. First time users of HeyGov will perform a search to link their account number with their email address. This only needs to be done once, as all successive invoices will auto-appear inside the user’s account within HeyGov
4. The users can then see their utility bill within their HeyGov account and can pay for it with their credit card
5. After payment, the transaction is auto-reconciled and auto-recorded in Workhorse. The files between HeyGov and Workhorse are synced in the background, automatically. This is a huge time saving feature. Prior to HeyGov, the reconciliation was a longer and more time-consuming process.

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Interesting Facts

• The City of Mineral point has seven different departments using HeyGov. 
• Each department has its own bank account linked or each department can be linked to one account. This is useful for individual departments because they can track their payments with more precision. They don’t spend time separating payments and GL’s. HeyGov tells each department admin all that was paid online in great detail.
• Tax and property tax payments, high dollar payments, make up two thirds of the payments processed by HeyGov, in the city.
• The city currently has 15 different payment forms available online
• And processes an average of $33,000 per month with the help of HeyGov’s payment solution. 

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Benefits of Using HeyGov

• Prior to using HeyGov (in 2022), the Parks & Rec department had around 100 applicants for their sports registrations
• In early 2023, and in just a couple months of implementation, the Parks & Rec department received more than 250 applicants for the sports registration! All these applications were digital and the city was able to quickly export the registrants and send it to the parks & rec team to start implementation without wasting time on scrounging through paper records and decrypting bad handwriting.
• They generated 2x the revenue after implementing HeyGov!

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The City of Mineral Point's innovative approach towards the HeyGov payment portal is a shining example of how digital transformation can revolutionize local municipalities, expanding the possibilities and use of online payment portals far beyond their initial intended use!

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