What a resident asks for is already pulled together
Municipal spending is disclosable by default. Every transaction keeps its own linked evidence. Publishing an expense report or answering an access request means retrieving records you already have.
Smartbills checks the appropriation and procurement threshold before the money moves and attaches the itemized receipt to each transaction without a photo.
The appropriation is checked before the crew buys
Council adopts a budget by department and fund, and your purchasing bylaw sets the amounts at which quotes and tenders are required. Both are applied when the request is raised, well before a variance report three weeks later would have flagged anything.
- Departmental appropriations and fund restrictions applied at the request
- Procurement thresholds triggering the approval your bylaw requires
- Capital, operating, grant-funded and reserve-funded work kept distinct
Purchasing cards that work on a job site
A purchasing card is the right tool for a crew buying gravel at eight in the morning. It's the paperwork afterwards that fails. Network receipts remove that step, and policy is applied at the terminal while the purchase is happening.
- Cards issued against a department, a project or a work order
- Itemized receipts sent through Smartbills, with no photograph to take
- Fuel, hardware and supply spend coded to the job it belongs to
Why teams switch
Card receipts reach finance late, or not at all.
Crews in every department carry purchasing cards, and their receipts reach us late or not at all.
Where the merchant is connected, the itemized receipt is attached to the card transaction at the moment of payment.
A department finds out it has overspent its appropriation only after the month is closed.
The appropriation and the fund are checked when the request is raised, so an overspend is stopped before it's committed.
Councillor expense disclosure gets rebuilt by hand every reporting period.
Disclosure is a report run over itemized, coded records. Publishing a period takes an afternoon where it used to take two weeks.
A freedom-of-information request asks for every transaction with one vendor going back four years.
The request, approval, receipt and payment stay linked and retrievable long after the staff who handled them have moved on.
The products that do the work.
Each product works on its own, and when you run two, the same record carries from the receipt to the ledger entry.
Expense management
Capture receipts, categorize expenses and check policy compliance as expenses are submitted.
Corporate cards
Coming soonCorporate cards with receipt capture, coming soon: the itemized receipt arrives with the card transaction, and each card's limit comes from your budget.
Accounts payable
Accounts payable automation that reads each supplier invoice, codes it and matches it to the purchase order before anyone is asked to approve payment.
Digital receipts
Digital receipt software that turns every sale at your POS into an itemized electronic receipt, hosted online and delivered by app, SMS, email or API.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What people ask us before they sign up.
No. Tyler, CentralSquare, Munis and similar systems remain your financial system of record. Smartbills controls and documents the spending, then posts coded entries into them.
No. Those are revenue systems with their own statutory requirements, and this is about money going out of the municipality.
It enforces the thresholds and approval routing your bylaw sets out. It doesn't run tenders, which stay with your procurement system or process.
By running a report. Because the request, approval, receipt and payment form one linked record, producing every transaction for a vendor or a period doesn't depend on the person who processed it still working here.
Data residency and retention come up in procurement, and they should. Ask us directly for the specifics instead of relying on a web page.
Through your normal purchasing process, usually starting with one department. Public works is the usual first choice because it has the most cards and the worst receipt capture, which makes the difference measurable within a month.
Get started
Start with public works and count the receipts
One department, one month, and a straight count of the purchases that ended with an itemized receipt coded to the right appropriation.