Expert support at a critical time

Annual Billing is a busy time of year, putting pressure on council staff and on the systems they rely on. Batch processing jobs can sometimes take hours or even days, meaning teams can be locked out of key systems and working weekends.

Maria Gorman is Service Support and Development Manager at Reigate and Banstead Borough Council (RBBC):

“Annual Billing can be intense at the best of times. Here at RBBC, we’ve got 63,000 Council Tax accounts and we need each bill to be right the first time. It takes a lot of effort to get ready and you still need to help customers with enquiries and applications. That’s why it’s important to keep downtime to a minimum.”

We moved RBBC’s application to our cloud in 2020. We host their NEC Revenues & Benefits solution, manage the database and monitor security and resilience continually to keep things running smoothly. Importantly, our experts consider the application and the hosting in tandem so they can optimise performance and keep teams online at critical times.

Super-fast processing delivers efficiencies

In 2023, this optimisation work paid dividends, with RBBC reporting their fastest ever processing speeds.

Here’s Maria again:

“Other authorities need to run their billing extracts overnight, but the biggest one we had took just four minutes – that’s really whizzy! The mass calculation we ran for Council Tax Reduction was twice as fast, too. It means staff are up and running quickly, ready to support our customers.”

This speed also has an impact on cost and work-life balance. By having everything wrapped up quickly, RBBC avoided overtime payments, out-of-hours support charges and weekend working.

It’s not just performance that’s improved, either. RBBC can also stay 100% focused on delivery while we take care of security and resilience.

Focusing on business continuity

Council IT teams everywhere are under pressure to keep their critical systems safe. By taking a cloud-first approach, RBBC has been able to reduce the time and cost of maintaining infrastructure and benefit from our 24/7 monitoring and proactive checks.

Find out more about NEC Cloud hosting solutions.