Use case: Automating Council Tax Arrears Management with Salesforce and FinDock
Local governments, whether in the UK, the Netherlands, or beyond, are under growing pressure to modernize service delivery. Council tax and municipal levies are among the most visible touchpoints between government and citizens, and yet the arrears management process often remains fragmented, slow, and impersonal.
Most councils rely on a mix of legacy finance tools, manual reconciliation processes, and disconnected CRM or communication platforms. Service teams operate in silos. Payment records are stored elsewhere. And follow-up on missed payments? Usually driven by spreadsheets and batch letters.
By bringing payment operations into Salesforce with FinDock, municipalities can automate the full lifecycle of council tax collection – including how they detect, manage, and resolve arrears. The result is a unified platform that improves both payment experiences for residents and operational efficiency for staff – creating what we call customer payment happiness.
The challenge
Council tax and local levy collection is not just about collecting money. It’s about delivering a fair, transparent, and citizen-first experience. Especially when dealing with missed or failed payments, governments are expected to apply socially responsible debt collection. But for many local governments, payment failures become a black hole:
- Residents miss an instalment, and the only follow-up is a generic letter weeks later.
- Contact centres field calls with limited insight into the resident’s history or options.
- Back-office teams are stuck reconciling reports manually, escalating enforcement slowly and reactively.
- Residents are offered little flexibility to self-serve, understand their situation, or resolve issues on their terms.
The result? Delayed recovery, increased operating costs, citizen frustration, and limited ability to report on or improve the process.
This doesn’t just hurt recovery rates. It erodes trust.
The solution
With FinDock and Salesforce, municipalities can transform council tax arrears from a disconnected, reactive burden into a connected, automated process, anchored in real-time payment data.
Every interaction, from missed payment to repayment plan, happens in context. Arrears are no longer hidden in back-office systems, they’re made actionable in Salesforce.
That means:
- Payment failures automatically trigger workflows that tailor next steps based on the resident’s payment history and profile. Enabling automated processes where possible, and human involvement where needed.
- AI and human service agents see a complete picture, including household details, payment status, previous communications, and any enforcement activity, all surfaced with Agentforce.
- Residents can self-serve through Experience Cloud portals to view balances, update payment details, or set up a repayment plan.
- Payment collection methods like Bacs Direct Debit, SEPA, bank transfer, and online options are natively supported, enabling secure, compliant processing of instalments and repayments.
- Every transaction, retry, and communication attempt is tracked and auditable – giving councils the confidence to act and report with accuracy.
This isn’t about chasing debt harder, it’s about managing it smarter, with the right tools and insight in the hands of the right people.
The result
With FinDock and Salesforce, councils shift from firefighting to foresight.
Payment operations teams can stop spending hours compiling reports or managing exceptions manually. Instead, they orchestrate a seamless, rules-based process that supports recovery without sacrificing empathy. Arrears follow-up becomes consistent, timely, and proportionate, whether the resident is one day late or six months behind.
Residents benefit from a clearer, more supportive experience. They receive the right message at the right time, through the right channel, not a surprise letter out of the blue. They can take action online when it suits them. And if they do call in, agents are ready with the full story and helpful next steps.
Leadership gains real-time visibility into recovery performance, enforcement stages, and citizen engagement. Dashboards surface risks early. Audit logs simplify compliance. And strategic reporting becomes a proactive tool, not a time sink.
Municipalities are able to deliver better payment experiences and more efficient payment operations – all from a single, integrated platform. That’s how you unlock customer payment happiness in the public sector.
Why now?
As governments accelerate digital transformation, driven by rising service expectations, budget constraints, and an increased need for operational agility, now is the moment to rethink arrears.
Modernising CRM or finance systems? Introducing more digital self-service? Reviewing your debt recovery model?
These are perfect inflection points to embed payment operations into your transformation — and to shift from disconnected collections to automated recovery journeys that work for both councils and citizens.
Why FinDock?
FinDock is the only payments solution built natively on Salesforce used by public sector and nonprofit organisations across Europe for both online and offline payments. From recurring collection to real-time exception handling, repayment plans to complex enforcement workflows, FinDock ensures your payment data is connected, auditable, and actionable in the system your teams already use.
Whether you’re collecting council tax, waste disposal taxes, or water taxes, FinDock turns payments from a back-office process into a strategic public service capability.
Ready to reimagine how your organization handles long-term policy payments?
Book a discovery call and explore how FinDock + Salesforce can turn payments from a back-office process into a strategic public service capability.