Sarasota County is located on the West Coast of Florida, about 60 miles south of Tampa. The County’s 600 square miles extend west from rustic ranch land to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and Sarasota Bay. With more than 35 miles of gulf beaches, residents are within a short drive of the most spectacular white sand beaches in the world.
Once known primarily as a vacation or retirement destination, today Sarasota County is home to a diverse population. A great year-round climate, expanding employment opportunities, abundant leisure time activities and excellent schools attract creative entrepreneurs, skilled workers and professionals who want to thrive in a community where life is fun. The County’s population has grown increasingly and is currently at approximately 350,000.
With this growing population, Barbara Ford-Coates, Sarasota County Tax Collector, and her office face many challenges in their day-to-day activities. Not only do they handle the collection of property taxes but their responsibilities also include driver’s license registration, hunting & fishing license registration, occupational licenses, motor vehicle and vessel registration and collection of the tourist development tax. Each year, they will conduct approximately 336,000 transactions between three separate offices and the internet.
Prior to the purchase of Manatron Tax, the Tax Collector’s office was running on an in-house system developed by an IT department that served the entire County. The needs of the Tax Collector’s office were not the first priority for the IT department and when they lost a key person who had developed the system, Ford-Coates and her staff realized it was time to make a change.
“When IT lost this key person, it confirmed what we already suspected – that we would never build another system in-house. If the question is to build or buy, our answer is to buy. The economy of scale just isn’t there for an agency of our size and the vulnerability is too great,” said Liz Klaber, Sarasota Deputy Tax Collector.
Ford-Coates and her staff desired to have greater control over their system and were eager to implement a more feature-rich solution.
Sarasota County became a Manatron customer in 1987 (then CPS, which Manatron purchased in 2000). The County was running parallel for the first year and went live in 1988. At that point, Sarasota was only the second county in Florida to use this product.
In 2001, the county became a beta test site for Manatron’s MVP Tax system. As with any beta system, there were adjustments and obstacles. “There are challenges any time you are the test county on a new product. But being first allowed us to help develop the product.” says Klaber. “Based on what I’d heard about beta test sites, it in no way lived up to those war stories. Working with Manatron, we were able to take the base product and fine tune it. We loved being the beta county. We had the ability to enhance the system for all of the users in Florida.”
Later in 2001, Sarasota County implemented Manatron eGovernment for internet inquiry and e-commerce. Here, residents are able pay their property taxes on-line by credit card and the tax software immediately processes the transaction. Payments through e-commerce for the county have grown rapidly since its implementation. In fact, from 2002 through 2003, payments by e-commerce virtually doubled.
Manatron is proud to call the Sarasota County’s Tax Collector’s office one of the company’s many satisfied and loyal clients in the state of Florida and throughout the country.
“With Manatron, we can take advantage of state-of–the-art software and hardware which we could not afford as an individual user. We benefit from utilizing their national experience,” said Ford-Coates. “And in a hurricane prone state like Florida, we know we have disaster recovery in place in the event our office is unusable. It’s comforting to know you are not alone.”
“Anyone can write and produce software, but the commitment from the company and its people are what set Manatron apart.”
“Manatron has been a key ingredient in better serving our customers, which is our ultimate objective,” Diana Chadwell, Deputy Tax Collector, added. “When you consider the efficiencies we have achieved with e-commerce, remittance processing, system integration and flexible reporting, Manatron has enabled us to dramatically increase our service levels.”
“We are delighted to call ourselves a Manatron office.”
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