Owensville Parks and Recreation Department Director Angela Lairmore received approval from the Board of Aldermen Monday to move forward with the purchase of RecDesk, a parks and recreation management and point of sale software.

The discussion was placed on hold pending additional information regarding integration with the city’s government enterprise resource planning software being provided by BS&A.

Lairmore informed the board she was able to speak with both the proposed vendor RecDesk and Vermont Systems — a vendor that offers application programming interfaces (API) that integrate with BS&A.

Vermont Systems advised her that they do not recommend using their software for such a small municipality but rather using their sister company under CEH Holdings, RecDesk. However, since both are owned by the same entity, RecDesk may seek to add an API that integrates with BS&A in quarter one or two of next year.

Lairmore’s research included speaking with two cities that currently use both RecDesk and BS&A — Warrenton and Cape Canaveral in Florida. She reported that the Cape Canaveral representative she spoke with said for their municipality of around 33,000, they only spend about 15 minutes a day inputting manual entries but that those are related to sales tax inputs. Lairmore advised that since they do not add sales tax, the amount of time spent doing manual tasks would be reduced.

The cost for the software is $5,800 and $6,000 was budgeted earlier in the year for this need. An additional expenditure of $1,500 may present next year once the BS&A software is implemented to allow for a financial extract.

The RecDesk software system proposed would streamline management for registrations, memberships, facility rentals and programs. Features of the program include online registration, barcode scanning for faster check-ins and real-time attendance tracking.

Ward 1 Alderman and Board President Dr. Cathy Lahmeyer made the motion to approve the request, it was seconded by Ward 2 Alderman Denise Bohl and passed with all aldermen present in approval. Ward 2 Alderman Matthew Kramme was not present for the meeting.

Lairmore said that she is excited for the opportunity to spend more time on other tasks such as promotion and marketing for the department which will hopefully produce increased revenue.