Municipalities across the Southeast run their finances, utilities, and community services on Kestova. Here's what changed for them.
A full-service city of roughly 45,000 residents — water, sewer, refuse, police, fire, parks — was running its $240M annual budget across nine disconnected systems. Utility reads were exported to a spreadsheet before billing. Payroll lived in one system, time clocks in two others. Every month-end meant days of reconciliation.
The finance team's request to us was disarmingly simple: "make it simple." Not more dashboards, not more features — fewer systems, fewer steps, fewer places for numbers to disagree.
Kestova migrated seven years of ledger history, 21,000+ utility accounts, and 412 employee records — reconciled to the penny — and ran billing and payroll in parallel for two full cycles before cut-over. Go-live happened on a Tuesday. Nobody worked the weekend.
Today, a utility cycle that took four days takes one morning. Month-end close went from nine days to three. And when the auditors arrived, every schedule they asked for was a saved report — not a spreadsheet project.
"We asked them to make it simple. They took that more seriously than any vendor we've ever worked with."
A regional utility moved from a 20-year-old billing system to Kestova. Validated AMI imports and automatic leak detection cut exception handling from two staff-days per cycle to two hours.
A lean four-person finance office adopted Kestova budgeting and the citizen portal. Council reviews scenarios live in workshops, and the published budget book generates itself from the same data.
Our implementation manager knew GASB better than some auditors I've worked with. That's who you want configuring your chart of accounts.
I emailed support at 6:40 AM during a billing run. A human answered at 6:44. That has never happened to me with an ERP vendor.
The council asked why our transparency portal looks better than cities ten times our size. I told them: it came with the system.
Migration risk, parallel runs, audit trails, support response times — bring your toughest questions to a working session with our team.