Finance Director Keith DeMartini and Assistant Finance Director Lyndsay Maas share how partnering with Neumo modernized Santa Barbara’s payment processes, moving from manual cash and check systems to seamless electronic submissions.
Staff no longer manage high volumes of daily in-person counter visits and mail submissions.
Neumo handles transactions directly, removing the burden from the treasury department.
The city successfully moved the vast majority of businesses to online filing and electronic payments.
My name is Lyndsay Maas. I’m the assistant finance director with the city of Santa Barbara. I oversee a few departments within the city finance team, the treasury department, our utility billing group, and also our accounts receivable group, and that group works heavily with Neumo on a regular basis because they help collect our various taxes and assessments throughout the city.
When I started with the city about three years ago, our finance director had embarked on a lot of new projects to move us away from only accepting cash and checks for many of our different forms of payments with utility billing, our taxes, and our assessments. We were a bit behind the times in terms of taking electronic payments, and we’ve really leaped forward with taking many more forms of payment thanks to our partnerships with Neumo.
My name is Keith DeMartini, I’m the finance director for the city of Santa Barbara, and I’m responsible for all financial and budgetary operations for the city. We were definitely interested in workflow automation to help make our business processes run more efficient. It was very manual, very paper-based, very time-consuming. So I was very interested in automation possibilities.
I was very interested in allowing our businesses to pay and remit and file their remittances online and also pay with electronic forms of payments such as credit card and debit card. That was proven very successful with our partnership with Neumo. We’ve successfully had the vast majority of our businesses file online and also pay through electronic means.
One of the benefits we’ve experienced working with Neumo is specific to our treasury group is very happy with the Neumo payments platform that is accessible to our taxpayers for the various types of taxes and assessments that we collect. It really allows our team to feel comfortable and safe with the type of transactions that are being processed directly through Neumo payments.
It removes the work from our treasury department and from our banking relationship and puts it all with Neumo payments, and that allows us to feel comfortable and secure. 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 on a daily basis.
And, also it’s really important for the customers and the taxpayers. They prefer to pay online as well, especially with our business tax program. At first, people were a little unsure about having to pay online. They were used to coming into our office and writing their check and filling out these complex forms.
But once they became familiar with the online portal, they really preferred to be able to pay just with their debit card or their checking account with no fee and get their payment done and complete right away instead of having to wait for things to process in the mail.
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