Flagler Beach tells customers: The utility bill's in the mail By DANIEL LATHROP (daniel.lathrop@news-jrnl.com) Staff Writer FLAGLER BEACH - Nobody in Flagler Beach is going to pay a late fee for utilities this month.

Nobody did last month either - that's because the city is late mailing out the bills.

Bills for service in October weren't mailed until Nov. 12, just days before the Nov. 15 payment deadline.

Bills for November service likely will be mailed Friday, according to Gabe Casanova, Flagler Beach's finance director.

That's still late, but only slightly so. Normally, bills for the previous month's service are mailed out between the first and third of each month, Casanova said.

"People were pretty ticked off," he said of the delays, which were caused by a change to a new accounting software for the city.

Called "Nite Owl," the software has required manual intervention and extra work by the town's understaffed finance department, said Casanova.

"Until we have everything completely implemented, I don't feel that it's ethical to charge a late fee," Casanova said.

Problems when switching software are not unusual for cities, said Frank Hagy, chief information officer for the Florida League of Cities and former CIO for Orlando's city government.

"When you are making as massive a conversion as a typical financial system takes to go from one system to another, it's not unusual to have a few hiccups along the way," he said.

That change is for the best, Casanova said, because the city had a lot of trouble with its former system, a software package called Munis.

"We're still cleaning up messes form the prior system, so it's been hectic and I'm short two people," Casanova said.

Nite Owl was supposed to be in sole use Oct. 1, Casanova said, but the city still is getting it up and running due to unexpected problems moving from the old software.

According to Casanova, the billing problems have come because the information produced by Munis to use in converting to Nite Owl was incomplete and flawed.

As a result, Casanova said, the city has been sending meter readers to each building to make sure that correct information is entered into the new software and bills are accurate.

"We're going in there and we're finding that some people were not even billed correctly; they were under-billed," he said.

http://www.news-journalonline.com/2000/Dec/6/NT9.htm

-- Doris (nocents@bellsouth.net), December 07, 2000