How 3 Communities Improved Their Operations with VIP

Choosing new software is a big decision for any local government.

And we know most customer stories get told after go-live, once people have been using the software for a while. But the following three stories come before that.

The reasons they picked VIP already say a lot about the work they do and what they were ready to leave behind.

Here’s a glimpse into the beginning for each of these organizations and the goals they have for the future.

City of Painesville, Ohio

As the charter city and county seat of Lake County, OH, Painesville does it all.

They have a variety of employees at the utility: field-based meter readers, billing clerks, front desk clerks, a collections team, a payroll team, employees who pay bills, employees that receipt cash, employees who track grants, and employees who manage the budget. (Whew!)

Long story short, there's a ton of moving parts. And it gets even harder when the tools doing the work don't share information.

So Painesville picked the full VIP suite, hosted in VIP Cloud, to run the whole city on one connected system.

• VIP Utility Billing puts the whole water operation in one spot. Meters get read automatically, and those reads flow right into the bills. Work orders out in the field stay in sync with the meter data. Staff can track parts and inventory, and citizens can pay their bills with an online payment portal. Reading meters, sending bills, taking payments, and looking up an account all happen in the same place now. 

• VIP Accounting with Departmental Purchasing and General Billing keeps the fund side together, from buying and receipting to paying bills and tracking grants. General Billing also gives the city an easy way to bill for the odds and ends that don't go through the water utility. 

• VIP Payroll & HR with departmental time entry, VIP Employee Portal where staff can see their own pay and info, and Talent Management for hiring and onboarding bring the staffing side together, too.

• VIP Budgeting & Analytics for reports and budgeting, plus Asset Management and VIP Edge check printing, finish it off. 

For a city that takes care of people from the water meter to the paycheck, one system in the cloud means fewer handoffs and one less thing to worry about on a busy day.

City of Brook Park, Ohio

Just outside Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, Brook Park had a different problem. About 150 full-time employees, and a finance and HR team doing too much by hand.

Hiring meant paper. New folks filled out a stack of forms in person, and then those forms got filed away.

Purchasing meant paper too, with requests printed and walked around for signatures.

Department heads couldn't see their own budgets without calling the finance office, which made every change itself.

The bank reconciliation was done by hand. And fixed assets got added up once a year. (And yes, also by hand.)

The worst part? An earlier try at new HR and payroll software, with a different vendor, fell apart before it ever worked, which left the team careful about promises and protective of their data.

But none of that was due to a lack of effort. Brook Park earned a clean 2025 audit and an Auditor of State award to show for it. They just wanted tools that kept up. So they picked a full VIP setup with VIP Cloud:

• VIP Accounting with Departmental Purchasing gives every department a real-time look at its own budget and moves buying off paper, and the built-in bank reconciliation takes over that manual job.

• VIP Payroll & HR with Talent Management moves hiring online, so new people finish their paperwork before day one instead of at a desk that first morning, and it connects to the city's current time-entry system so payroll stops typing the same numbers twice. VIP Employee Portal gives staff their own pay stubs and tax forms.

• VIP Budgeting & Analytics turns reports that used to take days into something the finance office can pull anytime. And Asset Management plus VIP Edge secure check printing finish it off.

So far, it been two cities with two very different starting points. But they ended with the same answer: one system instead of a stack of them.

Liberty Township, Ohio

Liberty Township is up in Butler County, north of Cincinnati, and it's been growing rapidly for years. The system it started on was fine when things were smaller. Growing has a way of showing you where a starter tool runs out of room.

Pulling data back out was harder than it should have been, and the reports were thin.

When the township put out a formal request for quote to replace its finance and payroll systems, it spelled out they wanted:

One modern, central system that makes work smoother, gives better reports and more transparency, improves how work moves through the office, and ties the pieces together.

We figured... that list sounds a lot like VIP. 

So, Liberty Township picked a VIP Cloud suite that brings accounting, payroll, and budgeting into one place.

• VIP Accounting with Departmental Purchasing gives every purchase a clear path to follow and lets departments see their own budgets.

• VIP Payroll & HR with departmental time entry and time entry import brings payroll in-house, in place of a separate outside company, and lets the township pull time right in from tools it already uses.

• The Employee Portal gives staff a look at their own pay and info. 

• VIP Budgeting & Analytics, plus VIP Edge secure check printing cover the reporting, budgeting, and clean check runs the team had been missing.

And before any of it goes live, the township gets a sandbox to play in. They can test things, poke around, and get comfortable, so the first day on the new system isn't the first time they've seen it.

What These Three Have in Common & How We Can Help

Three different governments. Three different starting points.

Painesville wanted its whole city, utility and all, on one system in the cloud.

Brook Park wanted out from under the paper and the double entry.

Liberty Township wanted room to grow. Three different needs, and a few things they all share.

Public-sector work needs public-sector software. Fund accounting, utility billing, government payroll, and the clean records an auditor wants aren't add-ons you tack onto regular business software. They're the whole job.

One connected system beats a pile of separate tools. All three were tired of typing the same thing twice, chasing paper, or calling a coworker to find out what was left in a budget line. One system takes care of a lot of that on its own.

The paper can go. Onboarding, purchasing, approvals, timesheets, check runs. All of it can move off paper, and all three are moving it.

A partner that knows the work. All three picked a company that builds for local government, and only local government, and has since 1978.

We understand that you need software that the public can trust, that the employees can rely on to make their work lives easier, and that you can trust to power through even the toughest of work days.

At Software Solutions, we've worked with public-sector organizations since 1978, and our very first customer is still a customer today. We know the day-to-day of local government because we've spent decades helping people manage it.

Painesville, Brook Park, and Liberty Township are just getting started with us, and we couldn't be happier to have them. Welcome to the family!

Wondering what a move like this could look like for your city, county, or township? Let's talk.

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