Indian Shores Moves Government Finance to the Cloud

Organization Profile

• Industry: Municipal
• Location: Indian Shores, Florida
• Number of Employees: 25
• Population: 1,200
• Tyler Client Since: 2019
• Tyler Products/Solutions: ERP Pro, Content Manager

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Challenges

Just west of Tampa Bay, the residents of The Town of Indian Shores watch the skies six months out of the year. “We are on a barrier island right next to the Gulf,” said Amy Lockhart, director of finance and personnel. “We have lots of hurricane season preparation.” That exposure set a hard requirement for the town’s financial software: in an evacuation, payroll and payments still had to run.

The town’s on-premises setup made that difficult. Staff used Parallels, a remote desktop tool, and a virtual private network (VPN) to access the desktop version of ERP Pro via the web. The extra steps slowed everyone down. “The challenge we faced with our on-premises solution was latency — having to tunnel through the VPN to access the software,” Lockhart said. The connection stuttered, and pulling a report meant tunneling back through the VPN to retrieve it after the report had run.

For a small organization, the friction added up. “We are a small but mighty force here in The Town of Indian Shores, and we wear a lot of hats,” Lockhart said. “So asking folks to do more steps to accomplish a task is not acceptable.” Without easy access, purchasing depended on a few staff members in the finance office, and the audit trail stayed thin.

Solution

The Town of Indian Shores moved its financials to the cloud-based version of ERP Pro, replacing the VPN and Parallels workaround with web access from anywhere. The town approached the change deliberately, taking a “trust but verify” attitude during implementation. Meanwhile, the Tyler Technologies team built the process around the town’s priorities. “The team was awesome. They held your hand, but they weren’t pushy,” Lockhart said. “They let us make the agenda. They let us be the leader in the process.”

A sandbox environment loaded with the town’s own data let staff test freely before anything reached production. “I joke with my team and say ‘run with scissors, because you can’t hurt anything,’” Lockhart said. “You can test it. If it breaks, okay, no problem.” The detail that built her confidence was the data itself. “Tyler gives you your data. It’s not just a sandbox that they put a bunch of generic data in. It’s your data, so you can verify and really get that confidence level.” The town kept the testing environment after go-live to check unfamiliar tasks on the fly.

The cloud implementation ran in parallel with the legacy desktop software through cutover, with data shared across both iterations. This gave the team a familiar fallback while it built fluency in the new system. “Having that comfort of being able to run both of them simultaneously is a great asset,” Lockhart said. The town moved into production as soon as it was ready. “Our implementation team was like family,” she said. “They were here for us, they stood by us, it was a true partnership.”

Results

The clearest payoff showed up in storm season. With the web-based system, the town can run payroll and pay its bills from wherever its team lands, even mid-evacuation. “Being able to deploy our team anywhere or evacuate anywhere and be able to do payroll, to be able to pay our bills and keep our town functioning in emergencies, is huge for us,” Lockhart said. Reports that once required tunneling back through a VPN now appear on screen instantly — no extra steps necessary.

The same anywhere access reshaped everyday work across the organization. Each person in administration now has an ERP Pro login, and the town has fully implemented its purchasing system. Staff enter their own requisitions and receive their own budget and grant reports without routing the work through the finance office. “The most notable success for us, because we are small, is the ability to unlock the potential,” Lockhart said. “These things are tremendous savings for us.” The distributed entry also strengthened the audit trail, giving the town consistent reporting it can hand to auditors year over year.

Day to day, the cloud version proved easier to live in. Multiple tabs let staff move between screens without backing out of one task to start another. Content Manager runs faster, and report parameters carry over instead of needing to be re-entered each time. Because the system is web-based and intuitive, new hires get up to speed faster. “The average person is less intimidated by the system, and they’re not afraid to jump in and try it,” Lockhart said.

For Lockhart, the move came down to a partnership built on listening and honesty. “Tyler can be a great partner for us by continuing what they’ve always done, and that’s being a good listener,” she said. “If they don’t know the answer, they’ll say so. Then they’ll figure it out. It’s a true partnership.” Her advice to peers still weighing the move is direct. “If you’re using the desktop version, there’s no reason not to move to the cloud,” she said. “To those on the fence, take the leap. You’ll be glad you did, just like we were. You’ll save time, energy, and frustration.”

Asked to sum up the experience in a word, Lockhart did not hesitate. “If we had one word to describe our experience, I would say seamless,” she said. “We didn’t experience any outages. There were no real bumps in the road. I wasn’t expecting it to be that smooth, but what a wonderful surprise that it was.”