Transcript:
This is the Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller’s Office. We maintain all the treasury and the surplus funds for the county. An additional role that we do is we provide the management and receipting of the tourist development tax. We have a team who works with all of the short-term rental owners that rent for vacation and other short-term rental properties in the county. And so we maintain the records and the receipting for all of those rentals.
We generate over 30 million dollars in tourist-related taxes that is used by the tourist development department to do different things specifically marketing for tourism here in the county that drives part of our economic base. And so the different areas of the county wanted to know where that impact was happening and so we were looking for a product that would partner with us on what we were trying to get the data, the understanding where the tourist taxes were being collected, where the impacts were, where we needed to make management decisions how the tourist department works and applies those dollars towards supporting the tourism infrastructure here in the county. We’ve realized that there is a lot of data that we get in the county and what we found was we wanted a better way of using that to make decisions, to see trends, to utilize it for analysis.
One of the reasons the county contracted us to collect tourist tax is because of the reporting. Before GovOS, I would spend, at minimum, a half a day just to provide the reports needed for the industry and the county. After GovOS, I run two or three reports and it takes me about five, ten minutes, and I have the reports needed to give the county.
Our community, we get compliments from the different areas of our community on how well those reports provide data to make decisions, to understand trends, to understand what we’re doing with the tourist tax, and how it can build our economic base in tourism here.
So really, I would say there’s a few main reasons we chose GovOS and one of the things that set them apart from other vendors would be their customer service. We were in a need where we had to have software and we had to have it quick, GovOS stepped in, took control, and got us the product we needed in a short amount of time.
Behind, really, their customer service is their product team is there for you and not just there to implement their solution, but to find an implementation that works for your solution.
