Somerville is a city located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, just two miles north of Boston. It occupies slightly over 4 square miles, and it has a population of almost 79,000 including a myriad of immigrants.

The problem: Too much manual reporting, too little time

Alex Marini Lessin, director of finance for the Water & Sewer Department of the City of Somerville, was swamped with work as he juggled two roles – interim director as well as director of finance.

Heading the finance department, what he wanted was a snapshot of top-line numbers and the ability to keep tabs on up-to-date financial conditions. He wanted to be able to quickly pull numbers and give them to decision makers such as the mayor and his team.

But while he dreamed of automation and agility, to his dismay he found himself working with a system that required him to manually create reports. What he needed was a way to truly be able to check his finances at a glance and eliminate unnecessary steps in his work processes.

[Datarails] helped me uncover hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Alex Marini Lessin, Director of Finance
Water & Sewer Dept., City of Somerville

The solution: Avoiding crises with automation and visualization

For Marini Lessin, the two main benefits of Datarails are its automation and its visualization capabilities.

Using the visualization feature, he designed a summary dashboard that keeps track of the leading 5-6 top-level indicators that he wanted to look at on a frequent basis. He wanted to track overtime spending, and he wanted to do this by fiscal week. With Datarails, he created a table that compared overtime spending to income on a weekly basis.

“I rely on our visualizations a couple of times a week,” says Marini Lessin. “Knowing the data helps us plan, helps us know what kind of spare capacity we might have. It helps us make decisions quickly, which is important because sometimes there is a water main break, there’s an emergency, and we need to know pretty quickly whether we have the funds to help. And if we don’t, we need to do a thousand different things to get that money in an emergency.”

A daily part of the job is to approve payment batches before they’re submitted to City Hall. Datarails allows the city’s water department to track expenses and make sure all payments were submitted in the correct account, which Marini Lessin can now do much more efficiently than in the past. Datarails has helped him understand the overall picture and report back to his manager more quickly each month.

Marini Lessin also uses visualizations in Datarails to demonstrate budget capacity to his superior. This has allowed the city to move forward on an important pilot project to replace the water meters. Marini Lessin says he didn’t have time to crunch the numbers, so he let Datarails crunch them for him.

Getting started was quick and straightforward, he says.

“The ease at which I could move from raw materials of our systems to a tool that was helpful to me was very quick. I was very happy with the speed of onboarding and implementation,” says Marini Lessin.

Datarails helps us avoid crises. With Datarails, I have the chance to uncover insights that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Alex Marini Lessin, Director of Finance

Water & Sewer Dept., City of Somerville

The impact: Uncovering thousands in revenue

Marini Lessin has managed to uncover hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for the city with Datarails, as well as save at least 2 hours per week of work.

“Datarails helps us avoid crises,” says Marini Lessin. “With Datarails, I have the chance to uncover insights that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

His favorite part is being able to come up with an idea, work through it, and see his idea come to fruition without having to sit there and understand how to make the visualization happen.

“In one of our reports, there’s a column in it, the adjustments column, which I assumed was just adjustments, but it turned out that there was more going on behind the scenes,” he says. He enjoys learning what information is really carried in his reports and how it changes throughout the year.

“It’s been a breath of fresh air to see our finances in a new way, and it has allowed me to spend less time crunching data and more time making decisions,” says Marini Lessin.

It’s been a breath of fresh air to see our finances in a new way, and it has allowed me to spend less time crunching data and more time making decisions.

Alex Marini Lessin, Director of Finance

Water & Sewer Dept., City of Somerville