Juneau must replace the software behind its payroll and billing by 2030

Juneau is preparing to replace the software that runs its payroll, accounting and billing, a switch the city can't avoid because support for its current system ends in December 2030. City finance staff are treating the job as high risk.

Finance Director Angie Flick laid out the plan to the Assembly Finance Committee in July. "This is not because we want to, it's because we need to," she said.

The software is the city's back office. Two programs, Infor Lawson and Harris Govern, handle work including accounting, payroll, human resources, billing and paying vendors, according to Flick's presentation. The city's budget software and its sales tax system aren't part of the switch.

The city wants the new system running by July 2029, the start of its 2030 fiscal year. That leaves a cushion for problems before the deadline and for support after the switch, Flick said.

Flick said another Alaska city's large implementation went poorly and cost millions of dollars. Juneau plans to change how it works, and possibly city code, rather than customize the new software. Customizing software leads to security and upgrade problems, she said, according to the meeting minutes.

One slide put it this way: the city will not buy "the coolest system, gold-plated with all the bells and whistles imaginable."

As of July, there was no cost estimate and no money budgeted to buy a system, Flick said. She said she expected funding talks in January or February, and the city plans to seek proposals from vendors around March 2027.

That would be during work on the city's next budget, which committee Chair Christine Woll said at the same meeting will likely face a significant deficit, as this year's did.

The project will also take staff time. Some employees will need to work on it full time "for a significant period of time," the presentation said, and Flick said the city will likely add staff during the switch.

Assembly member Neil Steininger, who has worked through software changes at the state and at a private company, backed the no-customization approach. He told Flick to "stay strong and ask us for what you need to stay strong."

The project also aims to get city records out of file cabinets, desk drawers, shared network drives and SharePoint sites. A new document management system would start with records tied to the financial software, such as invoices, position descriptions and journal entries, and should be quicker to set up than the full system.