- Title
- Challenges and prospects of the billing system in a selected municipality – a dialectic examination
- Creator
- Mda, Lindokuhle Primrose
- Subject
- Municipal finance -- South Africa -- Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality -- Accounting -- Data processing
- Subject
- Municipal services -- South Africa -- Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality
- Subject
- Local government -- Finance
- Date Issued
- 2024-12
- Date
- 2024-12
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/70089
- Identifier
- vital:78293
- Description
- The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges and prospects of the billing system in a municipality in South Africa. Municipalities play an important role in providing services to business owners and residents. Of late the media has been awash by the incorrect billing that is caused by the faulty billing system in most South African Municipalities. Although there is a lot of literature re on the billing systems, there is a dearth of studies when it comes to south African context particularly at Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM). Therefore, it is important to explore the challenges and prospect that comes with the billing system in the chosen municipality to fill in the literature gap. A qualitative approach was employed whereby 12 participants, who were sampled using the non-probability, purposive technique were interviewed. The study analysed data using the thematic analysis technique. Semi-structured questions were asked during interviews as a data collection method. The participants provided a comprehensive coverage (CC) of the new billing prospects. The sub-themes namely incorrect and inaccurate billing, estimated bills, lack of incentives to pursue collection, negligence, corruption, enhanced revenue collection, enhancing record management, gathering relevant information from residents and the use of mobile payment solutions was partially covered (PC). The rest of the sub-themes were comprehensively covered. The results reveal that, on average all the themes were covered in the interview implying that the participants understood the challenges faced by the billing system in BCMM, the prospects that are associated by the introduction of new billing systems, the root causes of challenges within the billing system, strategies needed to be implemented and the use of new technology and innovation. All participants acknowledge the fact that the billing system used by the municipality has a lot of challenges and there is a requirement to either upgrade it or discard it in total and replace it with technological advanced smart meters to enable accurate and correct billing. The effects of the incorrect billing were felt by both the municipal management and residents The study recommends that municipalities in South Africa, particularly BCMM should integrate their billing system with new technology to optimise their service delivery system and enhance their revenue collection. Suggested billing software to be used in municipalities include SAP, SKYBILL Utility Billing and full ERP billing, among others. This software offer a range of benefits such as easy to monitor records, revenue collection enhancements and efficiency.
- Description
- Thesis (MBA) -- Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences, Business School, 2024
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (136 pages)
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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- Visitors: 23
- Downloads: 17
Collections
NMU Business School
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | MDA, L.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |