Residents of towns and cities almost always have to pay municipal rates. There are very few property owners who are not subject to these charges. Monthly billing occupies a large amount of the municipality's productive time, and yet at the same time the local authority also has to keep tabs on whether or not residents are paying their bills. The utility bill software that the municipality uses to perform these functions therefore needs to be able to support the latter.

In order to be successful, the software needs to satisfy some basic requirements. The issuing of the bills alone should satisfy several criteria. One of the most important of these is accuracy. There is a standing urban joke about how some people receive inaccurate municipal accounts. These typically refer to the astronomical figures that the bill displays, such as a power bill for millions of dollars. This is not, however, as much of a joke as it may seem.

Also, towns and cities are home to large populations, sometimes numbering several millions of people. This makes the municipal database of residents extremely large, so the software that is used should be able to accommodate a database of this size. These records are also being updated on a monthly basis, or at least continuously.

A particularly and notoriously tricky issue for municipalities is that of non-payment. There is probably no municipality that has not encountered this issue. The poorer residents in the more indigent suburbs sometimes do not pay due to nothing other than their lack of financial resources. However, there are also those who do not pay for other reasons, whatever those may be. The software should be able to deal with these residents, otherwise it is not adequate for municipal purposes.

Concerning the actual physical paperwork, i. E. The bills that are sent to the residents, this should be acceptable to them. Where a town or city has a linguistically diverse population, the paperwork needs to be sensitive to that. Sometimes, a bill in more than one language is sufficient, but in other towns or cities it is necessary to issue the bills in more than one language, depending on the recipient. The software should be designed to include more than one language where this is an issue.

Not everyone has the same level of literacy or education. Some people might be only partially literate, even though they are professional people or artisans. The fact that they are illiterate does not necessarily mean that they are impoverished or that they reside in the poorer areas of the town or city, or that they lack financial resources. In such cases, the bill should be easy to understand. Issuing paperwork to the entire population always involves this requirement and the software should be able to accommodate it.

The actual physical statement has its own requirements. A person who seldom reads such documents, or who is not literate, should be able to identify the important figures on it, and also the dates. This implies that it should be easy to assess, with a simplified layout.

Non-payment and inaccurate statements are two of the serious problems that municipalities encounter in the issuing of their bills. Their software therefore needs to be consistent and accurate. It should also offer extreme ease of use, since in some cities it will have thousands of users and millions of records.