Business Registration Software Case Study - Watauga, TX

Challenge

For years Watauga relied on an ad-hoc process combining paper records and Excel spreadsheets to manually record, process, and track the city's new business registration applications and permits. As Watauga has grown and economic activity has increased, this manual method of business registrations became extremely time consuming and unsustainable.

"Excel is great in accounting but not for economic development or customer service in government", said Andrea Gardner, Watauga's City Manager. Gardner was frustrated by an inability to quickly create professionally formatted reports, make notes, or attach documents to records.

An additional issue came in the form of illegible handwritten forms submitted by new business applicants. According to Gardner, more than half of applications were ineligible, requiring staff to get in touch with the applicant to clarify, and then re-enter data, often adding days to the process.

Economic development in the city has accelerated. Watauga now sees on average 10 new business applications per month vs 2-3 per month pre-pandemic, many of which are new home-based businesses. As the workload increased for her staff, Gardner became extremely frustrated with the Excel-based process and knew the time had come for a change.

Solution

Recognizing the need to switch over from Excel, officials from Watauga engaged GovPilot to provide an end-to-end cloud-based digital business registration process. The results were immediate. According to Gardner, work that took days with Excel, now takes only minutes - or just a couple of clicks with GovPilot.

The staff report being happy that they are now able to enter notes directly in the system and track all contacts. In fact, that is where GovPilot demonstrated its strength immediately. In February 2021, during the Texas winter storm event many local businesses were impacted. The Watauga staff were able to quickly and easily look up contact information of local business owners and reach out with resources.

New business registrations in Watauga have since doubled, and the staff are able to keep up, fully processing registrations in a matter of hours rather than days. Furthermore the staff are now able to generate detailed, well formatted reports in a matter of clicks which the board of directors (council) have been very pleased with.

Results

97% Time Savings

Employees now take less than two minutes to enter information and instantly update the system rather than manually entering handwriting notes into Excel.

Automatic Reporting

Formatted reports to the council are generated in a matter of clicks rather than hours and displays more accurate information.

Three Clicks

The business registration team are able to generate comprehensive, well-formatted reports in just three clicks.

100% Accurate Forms

With GovPilot’s digital forms, illegible handwritten information is a thing of the past, helping to speed the process.

Customer

Population

System Replaced

GP Modules Deployed by Watauga

Business Registration

Challenge

Solution

"The beauty of GovPilot is that it eliminates the complexity of our old manual process and puts everything at our fingertips. Work that used to take days, now takes minutes."