Brighton goes to Xero to achieve efficiencies and cost savings

BRIGHTON Council has adopted a new, cloud-based financial and accounting package achieving increased efficiency and significant cost savings.

The Council has moved to the highly efficient Xero platform and is also selling the package to other councils through its business subsidiary CouncilWise.

Mayor Tony Foster said Xero costs Brighton just $150 per month and completes the council’s movement to the cloud removing the need for expensive servers and other expensive IT hardware.

Cr Foster said Brighton recently reviewed its finance systems, and while its current system had served it well, a market review indicated Council would be better served moving to the full-featured Xero commercial product.

“Local Government must constantly juggle growing social responsibilities, infrastructure requirements and rising costs, ensuring that the costs of service delivery to the community is kept as low as possible.

“From a business systems perspective, this means taking a good hard look at legacy systems and making changes. That is what we have done.

“We were happy with what we had, but that is never an excuse not to review the market to determine if something else delivers the same level of effectiveness at a reduced cost.”

Cr Foster said Brighton’s staff were more than satisfied with the Xero software.

“The price is simply unbelievable, and the training and support available is extensive.

“As a result, our business CouncilWise now has a very strong level of confidence recommending Xero to our small and medium-sized council clients, and we are rolling out a large number of pre-built integrations into our broader local government management offering.

“Brighton Council and our expert staff have made significant transformations in one short year. We have moved our technology entirely to the cloud, we have changed our financial package to Xero and our company CouncilWise has made commercial sales to other councils,” Cr Foster said.

Councils interested in learning more about how Xero can assist their operations can contact CouncilWise at [email protected].