How Can a City Streamline Residents’ Payments Journey?

Organization Profile

• Industry: Municipal
• Location: Naperville, Illinois
• Number of Employees: 1,000
• Population: 150,000
• Tyler Client Since: 2016
• Tyler Products/Solutions Used: Enterprise ERP, Enterprise Permitting & Licensing, Payments, Cashiering
• Tyler Excellence Award Winner: Civic Interaction & Public Trust

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In Search of a Better Way to Enable Online Purchases

Located 28 miles west of Chicago on the DuPage River, Naperville has been named a Tree City USA for 34 consecutive years. One of the ways the city has maintained that designation is by holding an annual Arbor Day tree sale, a popular opportunity for community members to purchase and plant trees of their choice. The online sale offers maples, oaks, and elms, with the option for residents to plant trees on their own property or in a public walkway.

As the rush to purchase trees begins each spring, the Naperville Finance Department recognized an opportunity to improve the process by streamlining billing, payments, and dispersal of about 500 trees.

“We wanted to find an online solution for people to purchase trees more easily and securely,” explained Mary Buckley, business systems analyst on the technology and operations team.

The city’s goals included:

• Implementing an online payment experience integrated with Enterprise ERP
• Ensuring full PCI compliance to safeguard cardholder data
• Allowing residents to view and select specific tree species from a diverse inventory

Enhancing the Online Tree Sale Experience

To achieve its goals, the city turned to Tyler’s Payments platform embedded with Enterprise ERP’s Resident Access self-service portal application.

“With the assistance of Tyler, we were able to set up a form that enables customers to select their desired trees to purchase from our large and varied inventory,” says Mary Buckley, business systems analyst. “They can pay immediately online via the Resident Access portal as well.”

Using Resident Access and Payments, community members can access an online inventory of trees and purchase them without having to create an account on the city’s website. The transition also ensured compliance with PCI standards.

Adopting an integrated payment system not only made it more accessible and secure for the community to participate in the Arbor Day Tree Sale but also increased efficiency in tree distribution.

“Through Payments, we were able to provide the necessary reporting to our Department of Public Works, so that when tree pickup day came, they were able to easily identify which trees went to which customers,” says Buckley. “It was a fairly seamless process for our first year.”

With support from Tyler, Naperville quickly transitioned from hosting the sale on its website to using the portal to allow guest checkouts.

“We felt that Tyler really did a great job preparing us to be able to use Tyler’s Payments portal,” says Rudy Zucker, a project manager on the technology and operations team for the finance department. “They walked us through the setup, how to create the charge code, and connect the portal to the ERP software in the general ledger.”

Zucker added that the team was able to launch the form in about one day, even with a round of internal testing to ensure the inventory was accurate.

Delivering a Better Experience for Residents

Using the Payments portal to purchase their desired trees was not only more accessible to users, but it also added a necessary level of security for constituents’ payment information.

“This was a very important step in our ability to create and maintain a PCI-compliant environment, considering the new standards,” says Buckley.

The enhanced process enabled the city to:

• Launch a secure online portal allowing residents to continue ordering and paying for trees with confidence
• Reduce the number of staff involved in completing each transaction
• Improve reconciliation and back‑office efficiency through ERP‑integrated payments

“There is a lot of value with having the payment system integrated with your ERP software,” said Zucker. “Just the fact that when we go to reconcile, the batches are downloaded overnight. It’s put into the ERP system, and we can immediately start proofing the transactions from the previous date, check for errors, return payments, and have all of that seamlessly move back and forth between a customer-facing portal and our back end.”