How Upper Hutt City Council went from paper to digital in less than 24 hours – and kept going

The Challenge

Before New Zealand’s first lockdown, the rates team ran almost everything on paper. When lockdown hit, they had less than 24 hours to transition to working from home – they didn’t even have laptops and had to physically haul desktop computers and screens home.

The team turned to email, but that created its own problems. The shared rates inbox received over 100 emails a day. Things were getting lost, accidentally deleted, or sitting in the approvals box unactioned.

The rates refund process was a good example of the old way. Every refund involved about six or seven pieces of paper – moving from a rates officer’s desk, to the team leader’s desk, to two floors up to accounts payable. Every refund, every day.

“Things were always getting lost in paper. And email was no better – we were losing things on email.”
— Kristen Scoble, Senior Rates Officer, Upper Hutt City Council

The Solution

The council had been evaluating Flowingly as a process mapping tool, but Kristen saw the real value in workflows. She was pulled into the project at around the fourth meeting – and with no training, just started playing.

“I knew I couldn’t break anything, so I might as well just play. And I had figured out quite a bit by the time they sent me the instructions.”
— Kristen Scoble, Senior Rates Officer, Upper Hutt City Council

Her first flow – the rates refund took under 20 minutes for the basic version and about two to three hours with customised forms. She started simple and iterated from there, adding tables, lookups, and video guides over time as she learned what was possible.

Because Kristen actually runs the processes day-to-day, she could design exactly what was needed. She built in the right approval routing, asked exactly the questions the team needed answered, and created a full digital audit trail – who did what, and when.

The team later built a solicitor request flow – an external-facing form where solicitors submit requests through a link and receive an automatic acknowledgement with a three-day response commitment. That killed the constant “did you get it?” follow-up emails they’d been getting.

“We were getting multiple emails from solicitors saying ‘did you get it?’ if we didn’t respond within an hour. Now they get an automatic email as soon as they submit – and they give us a break.”
— Kristen Scoble, Senior Rates Officer, Upper Hutt City Council

A new staff member, Jenny, had joined the rates team just a month before lockdown. Because every step was visible in Flowingly — with embedded video guides for more complex tasks — she was able to learn processes that would have otherwise required in-person training that wasn’t possible during lockdown.

Results

The rates team now uses three core workflows daily – rates refunds, penalty remissions, and solicitor requests. Approvals that previously took days now get done the same day, usually within hours.

The Team Leader’s routine changed completely. Instead of gathering paper from around the office or trawling through email, she logs into Flowingly each morning, sees what needs approving, and works through it. The nudge button handles the rest if anything’s lagging.

“It’s so easy now that she gets them done the same day, usually within hours of us asking for it.”
— Kristen Scoble, Senior Rates Officer, Upper Hutt City Council

The team also solved an unexpected problem: during lockdown they hit SharePoint’s 5,000-file limit. Everything is now stored in Flowingly – easier to search and no cap on documents.

Kristen has since expanded into the animal control team and continues to build new workflows. A dog refund flow took 20 minutes to draft and an hour to refine the next morning. The plan is to eventually replace all paper forms on the council’s website with Flowingly flows.

Kristen’s main job is still debt collection for the rates team. Building workflows is something she fits in around that – and it’s become the part of the job she looks forward to most.

“Normally when I have Flowingly, that’s my happy time – I get to have a little bit of time where nobody’s telling me why they can’t pay their rates, and I can do something fun.”
— Kristen Scoble, Senior Rates Officer, Upper Hutt City Council