How the City of Santa Barbara, CA Modernized Tax Collection With Neumo

Managing business tax certificates and utility user tax filings was very manual and very time-consuming prior to partnering with Neumo. We had over sixteen thousand businesses that filed their annual business tax certificate renewal in our office, and we only accepted payments, mostly through checks. Some people still paid with cash. And so we really wanted to modernize and standardize our business processes so that it was much more efficient. We provided better customer service to our businesses and our remittance filers, and it was just more transparent, more accountable.

We were a bit behind the times in terms of taking electronic payments, we’ve really leap-forwarded with taking many more forms of payment thanks to our partnerships with Neumo, with many of our different types of taxes that they have helped us collect. Neumo helps us with administration and also collection of taxes and assessments through their various payment portals. We’re now able to take payments through electronic means, moving away from the traditional wire, which is a pretty timely process for our accounting team to manage, and just moving through the new mode administrative portals to have payments go electronically via ACH.

And we’ve seen our workflow really improve over the last few years because we’re not having to handle so many individual transactions that are either at the counter or processing mail on a daily basis. When we decided to partner with Neumo to have Neumo handle our business tax certificate administration program, one of the primary reasons to partner with them was because of their online payment portal and besides it just being a payment portal, it’s also where our taxpayers go online to file for their business tax certificates.

So, when our businesses can just go online and select that they are maybe a barber or they’re a restaurant and then that form populates the type of information that they need to supply, it’s much more user-friendly for them and it calculates the tax amount that is owed to the city correctly, quickly, and the process is significantly faster than it was in the past. And it’s also taken a large burden off of our staff and them having to understand the hundreds of different nuances depending on the type of business that is there in front of them asking, what exactly is my tax rate, how do I calculate this?

So, besides the online portal just providing a quick and easy way for people to pay electronically, it’s also making the process for completing their business tax certificate application significantly more user-friendly and easier than it was prior to us partnering with Neumo. We were very effective with getting our taxpayers online and paying online right away within the first year. We had ninety percent of our taxpayers file online after we implemented with Neumo. And it’s just getting better and better each year to the point where now we really have almost no impact on our operations during the heavy business tax renewal season.

It’s been a huge success for us.

The work we do and the work that we continue to improve on cannot be done without continuing to focus on technology solutions. So, partnering with companies like Neumo and experts in the field that can provide systems and other solutions for us to improve our services to the residents of Santa Barbara.