The costs were sustained, among other things, because extra staff has been deployed to resolve the backlogs. In the first instance, fifty FTEs started with the creditor administration. There is now sixty FTEs. They will start in the coming months.
13,000 invoices.
The municipality is currently a backlog of nearly 13,000 invoices that have already fallen outside the payment period. In February it was still 27,000 invoices paid too late.
In addition, the municipality tries to eliminate the backlogs by providing advances to suppliers who have many invoices open. The municipality has made an offer to 32 suppliers for an advance payment. These 32 suppliers together have around 12,000 invoices open at the municipality, of which about half of which are outside the payment period.
Multiple delays
The payment arrears emerged when the alderman received questions about the functioning of the AFIS in the committee, since 1 January the payment system that the municipality works with.
The first delay arose at the beginning of December, when the old billing system closed. Invoices that had not yet been handled were then transferred to AFIS. But because of a technical problem that did not work.
When that problem was resolved, it was only possible to start loading invoices that had arrived between the closure of the old system and going live of AFIS, early January. When loading this group of invoices, 21,000 in total, problems arose again.
Then there was a problem with the AFIS recognition system. Many invoices must be continued automatically, but that got stuck. That perseverance of invoices to the commissioning management had to be done manually at the time.
And it was precisely the manual opening and handling of invoices that lasted longer than expected, also as a result of a technical problem. A software update has since been implemented for this.
On Thursday, Alderman must reply to the invoice problems in a committee of the municipal council.