New Payroll System is Live

Sometimes on the County Board, we have to vote to spend money, it would be irresponsible not to, and our new payroll system is one such example.

When I was first elected, I found out that we had a payroll computer system that was about 30 years old (I am not exaggerating, it was installed in the late 1980s).  We were preserving an old computer, with a monochrome screen (green letters on a black background), just for our payroll system.  To transfer data into our accounting system, if I recall correctly it had to be saves to a floppy disk, and then taken to a computer where the data could be transferred to a thumb drive, and then it could be taken to a modern computer and loaded into our accounting database.  If anything went wrong, with either the computer or the software on the computer, finding people who were familiar with technology that old was challenging, as they were all reaching retirement age.

Clearly we could not continue with a payroll system that was so drastically outdated.  The new payroll system would have an expensive price tax, $900,000, but it was money we had to spend.  Early into my term, in 2016, the County Board voted to update our 30 year old payroll system.  I voted with the clear majority, to bring our payroll department out of the 1980s.

This month, after more than a year of work, our new system went live.  Our employees n longer need paper timecards, instead recording their time electronically.  As well, our current County Administrator has made a commitment to always purchasing the software upgrades so that the system will remain current, and never need such a massive or expensive overhaul.

Do I like spending $900,000 of taxpayer money?  Absolutely not, but in this case we had to upgrade our payroll system.  The best part, we did it and still were able to lower taxes.