The vendor said it wasn’t supported. The city needed a report.

The city moved its utility billing to a new platform. Every month, the water department mails about 2,000 bills. On the old system, staff exported a file, uploaded it to USPS, bought all the postage in one batch, and trayed the mail. On the new system, they couldn’t find a way to produce that file. They contacted vendor support repeatedly, describing the USPS process, and were told the platform didn’t support it. The alternative was handling each bill individually, every month.

The request was being described in terms of the old workflow, so the vendor kept hearing a feature it didn’t have. What the department actually needed was much simpler: a report with each customer’s name, mailing address, and account number. We reframed the problem, then walked staff through building that report in the system they already had. It took a few hours.

While we were in the process, we looked at how mail went to landlords with many units in town. Staff had been pulling every bill for a landlord, sometimes 50 or more, and stuffing them into one envelope by hand. The department’s real goal was getting customers onto paperless billing, so we asked a simple question: what if you stopped doing that?

Bulk mailing works again, and the department handles all 2,000 bills in one batch. Landlord bills now go out as individual postcards like everyone else’s, which removed a manual sorting step and gives landlords a reason to sign up for paperless billing.