This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast features Hollie Poole, accounts payable specialist for Pickens County, sharing how the county modernized its financial operations by moving from disconnected systems to a unified, cloud-based ERP platform. Hollie discusses how automation and AI-powered invoice capture are helping streamline accounts payable, improve transparency, and give departments real-time visibility into financial data. The conversation also explores the importance of building organizational buy-in and how Pickens County is using technology to create more efficient and collaborative government operations.
In this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, Hollie Poole, accounts payable specialist for Pickens County, Georgia, shares how a small but highly collaborative county modernized its financial operations by moving from disconnected systems to a unified, cloud-based ERP platform.
Serving a community of roughly 35,000 residents just north of Atlanta, Pickens County faced challenges common to many local governments — fragmented systems, limited visibility into financial data, and manual processes that slowed collaboration between departments. Hollie explains how adopting a modern ERP platform created a shared source of truth across the organization, giving departments real-time access to financial information while improving transparency and decision-making.
The conversation explores how cloud technology, automation, and AI-powered invoice capture have transformed accounts payable workflows, reducing manual data entry and making it easier to track approvals, manage invoices, and maintain a clear audit trail. Hollie also shares how automation and scheduled reporting have empowered departments to monitor budgets, track outstanding purchase orders, and address issues proactively instead of waiting for monthly reports.
Drawing on Pickens County’s experience, Hollie reflects on the importance of building organizational buy-in during technology transitions, emphasizing that modernization succeeds when teams understand the purpose behind the change and share a common vision for improvement.
This episode offers a practical look at how counties of any size can use cloud technology, automation, and AI to streamline financial operations, strengthen transparency, and create a more connected and efficient government — reinforcing Tyler’s mission to help communities operate more effectively.
This episode also spotlights Tyler Connect 2026, where innovation and collaboration take center stage. Taking place April 7-10 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas. Connect brings together public sector professionals from across the country to explore new solutions, share ideas, and strengthen communities. It’s a week dedicated to learning, connection, and imagining what’s possible for the future of government technology. Explore registration details to start planning your Connect 2026 experience.
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Hollie Poole: So, we really wanted to give everybody access to what we were looking at and just kind of foster that real-time information at your fingertips.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Henderson. Today’s episode looks at how counties can modernize financial operations without sacrificing transparency, collaboration, or trust, and how cloud technology and AI can bring teams together around shared, real time information.
And my guest is Hollie Poole, accounts payable specialist with Pickens County, Georgia. Located just north of Atlanta, Pickens County has moved from disconnected systems to a modern cloud-based ERP using automation and AI to improve visibility, streamline approvals, and reduce manual work across departments. Hollie shares practical lessons on earning buy in, using AI to simplify invoice processing, and building a foundation that supports better decision making today and continued efficiency in the future. There’s so much to cover, so let’s dive right in.
Hollie, it’s so great to have you here on the podcast today. Thanks so much for joining us.
Hollie Poole: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Josh Henderson: Of course. Now to start, can you just tell us a little bit about your role in Pickens County and how your team fits into the broader operations of the county government?
Hollie Poole: Yes. So, I am the accounts payable specialist within our finance team, and I work with all of the requisitions, invoices, and some fixed assets. Our whole team works together with all of the departments across the county to monitor revenue, expenditures, and provide reporting.
Josh Henderson: Great. And now just to give folks just an idea of where Pickens County is located, if people are located outside of Georgia, where is Pickens County in relation to, I guess, some of the bigger cities in Georgia, like Atlanta?
Hollie Poole: Okay. So, we’re just north of Atlanta, just north of Cherokee County.
Josh Henderson: Great. And how many people are you representing there in Pickens County?
Hollie Poole: Oh gosh. About 35,000.
Josh Henderson: Okay. Good to know. Good to know. And now, you know, Pickens County is known for being sort of a tight knit community. It’s, you know, thirty five thousand people. It’s small comparative to, you know, some other counties across, the country, but there’s a lot of strong collaboration happening across county offices, local school boards, cities, etcetera. How did that community driven approach sort of influence the way you wanted your internal systems to work?
Hollie Poole: Yes. So, we love that, you know, sense of collaboration between all of the represented parties. And I think there was a fear that too much digital integration would stymie that connection. So, we really wanted to give everybody access to what we were looking at and just kind of foster that, you know, real time information at your fingertips. And that was really helpful in, you know, assuaging some of those fears.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. That’s great. And now before adopting ERP Pro, and I guess we should preface this with saying that that ERP Pro is has been implemented in Pickens County. It’s the solution that you all work with there in Georgia. But what were some of the biggest operational challenges your team faced before that adoption, especially around accounts payable, your area of expertise?
Hollie Poole: Yes. So, before we moved to ERP Pro, we had two separate systems. So, we had one that was like a document manager, for lack of a better term, a digital filing cabinet.
Then we had an accounting software. Both systems were not being updated regularly and just didn’t have a lot of functionality that was needed. So, we really needed the reporting invoice approval modules and ease of viewing outside of just the finance department.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. So, you mentioned this idea of having those two disparate systems, those separate systems for document management and for accounting.
How did those disparate systems, those separate sort of functioning systems, how do they impact accuracy, efficiency, communication between your departments?
Hollie Poole: That was a big issue for us. The departments did not have access to real time information. So, it made it really hard for them to make decisions about what they were going to buy or, oh, do I have enough budget left? And sometimes if they needed information between, you know, monthly reports, it either wasn’t available or they had to wait a long time for it. The departments really only had access to the digital filing cabinet, they didn’t have access to the software. So that was frustrating for a lot of them because sometimes it just wouldn’t match, or it just didn’t quite meld together the way we wanted to see that.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. I mean, let’s talk a little bit about that and this idea of buy in and the idea that, you know, folks maybe didn’t want to see any sort of changes in their day to day, but it was it was almost necessary, at that point to kind of create more efficiencies, create more of a connected system. So, tell me a little bit about that. How are folks responding to the idea of modernization in Pickens?
Hollie Poole: Well, with any, you know, change comes, you know, challenges and learning curves and but we had a lot of buy in. People really wanted, you know, that cohesive integration, and we wanted to collaborate. So, this really helped us to get to that point. And it was hard before. You just couldn’t see what you needed to see without really diving in deep.
Josh Henderson: I’m assuming you’re getting a lot of positive feedback now after the fact. But what was the initial motivation for that modern cloud based ERP solution? What stood out to you about Tyler’s solution that that may that maybe helped make it become that key solution for the county?
Hollie Poole: Absolutely. We really had the need We needed to fix the inefficiency of the old processes because of the software capability and access issues.
It really stood out to us because we could customize that access. We could give certain departments more access if they really needed it and you could give that cloud interface to an intermittent user and they could use it just as easily as we do, the ones of us that live in the software, so to speak. So, and we really like the ability to customize that base platform. You can build on it as your needs change.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. And, you know, we talk to a lot of folks who have made that move to the cloud-based system, the cloud-based solution.
It is often a big change. Right? And it looks different for different jurisdictions. It looks different for different types of government entities.
So, you know, I was talking to, for example, a school district recently where, you know, people don’t have to kind of come to campus to see files, paper files anymore. Right? Everything’s digital. But how was it a game changer for you and your staff?
How did the staff across different departments adapt to it, especially to your point, those who use it only intermittently?
Hollie Poole: So, it was kind of hard at first because they weren’t really used to entering their own data. They would submit requests to us, and then we would enter that into the accounting software, which was dual entry at that point. That was really challenging. But as they got, you know, used to that responsibility, that cloud interface made it so much easier because it’s really like clicking through a website and everybody’s familiar with, you know, going through the website, entering the things that you’re, you know, trying to accomplish. And that was where we just kind of partnered with them with, hey, let me sit with you and help you through the first one you enter. And then they really gained a lot of traction with that.
Josh Henderson: It feels as though sometimes with the with the move to the cloud, it’s kind of similar to how residents want to be interacting with their local government.
Like, you see that happening in in whether it’s a bigger county or whatever it might be where you’re thinking, oh, that was really efficient and easy from a resident’s perspective.
I’m assuming some of that goes into how you all are approaching solutions or understanding sort of the resident experience throughout all of this. What can you tell us about the resident experience and how that factors into, you know, understanding these solutions and wanting to implement these types of solutions?
Hollie Poole: So, I don’t really have a lot of experience interacting directly with residents, but I know our utilities department does, and they have implemented a lot of those solutions. And they’ve had a lot of positive feedback as far as getting people in there to use those, and that creates efficiency within their department. They’re not having to enter those in person payments as often. There’s also a lot of transparency with that too. When we’re able to create that digital environment of, we can pull it at any moment, it really gives people peace of mind that, you know, we’re trying to do the right thing here.
Josh Henderson: We do we do love to hear that. Now I wanted to switch gears a little bit because the county also implemented some artificial intelligence solutions. Obviously, AI is a big talking point, these days in the technology world. But AP automation, invoice capture, those are two of our solutions that have been implemented there in Pickens County. Can you describe a little bit how these tools have changed your workflow or your staff’s workflow from manually entering invoices to creating that automation for most of the process?
Hollie Poole: Yes. They have changed everything.
So, it is we love it here because at any moment, there’s not a question of, hey, where’s that invoice? Or who’s supposed to be looking at that? We have it at our fingertips all the time.
And the way that it captures is really amazing. I tell people all the time, I’m like, oh, I just grab your invoice off of my email and I throw it in the capture and they’re like, you do what with it?
And so, when I show them what it can do and how it pulls the information off of the invoice and how much time is saved within that, you know, AI capture and it learns. So, as we’re entering the same, you know, type of invoice over and over, it’s learning what to pick up off of it.
And it’s really a huge efficiency, you know, time saver. We love it.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Big news! Tyler Connect 2026 is heading to Las Vegas.
Jade Champion: That’s right. Join us April 7-10 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas for an unforgettable week of learning, collaboration, and connection.
Josh Henderson: Connect brings together thousands of public sector professionals to explore the latest solutions from Tyler, share ideas, and discover new ways to strengthen and empower their communities.
Jade Champion: You’ll experience hands on product training, insights from industry leaders, and opportunities to connect with peers driving innovation across the public sector.
Josh Henderson: You’ll leave feeling energized and ready to bring fresh strategies and new perspectives back to your organization.
Jade Champion: Registration is open now, so don’t wait to secure your spot at tylertech.com/connect.
Josh Henderson: We’ll see you at Tyler Connect 2026 in Vegas where we empower, collaborate, and imagine what’s possible for the public sector.
Jade Champion: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: AI, it seems, is something too that, like, there’s people have a lot of questions about it. Right? It’s so new. It’s, you know, people compare it to the advent the advent of the Internet itself.
You know? It’s this idea of, you know, how can we make this work for our company, for our government? Can you just share a little bit of an example or, like, a process, you know, maybe an invoice approval or PO match maybe that became significantly easier or faster? Like, how does how does that look on your end?
Hollie Poole: Absolutely. So, I get invoices as PDFs in my email every day, sometimes hundreds.
So, that capture makes that so quick. And I just drag it into the capture portal, that invoice loads. And then if it doesn’t have a purchase order listed on the invoice, which sometimes they do come in like that. We try to get them on there but sometimes they don’t and I can really quickly click that PO drop down button and it tells me if there are any POs open for that vendor and then I can see if they match and it’s a very quick process to see and if it does, a couple of clicks and then I send it off for approval. If it doesn’t match then I can very easily screenshot that, send it to the department and say hey what are our next steps with this? Is this legitimate?
Do we need to push back a little bit? What do we need to do with this? And then I just keep those in that queue until we decide whether that invoice is payable or if we need a PO for it, that kind of stuff. And it’s really great to have everything in that one location because we can really go back and say, okay, this is exactly where it is in the approval process.
Josh Henderson: I guess peace of mind, I think, is the thing that comes to mind for me when hearing some of these examples. But was there any apprehension, initially? Like, how did the implementation of an AI solution occur in Pickens County?
Was there pushback? I know, like, when you’re dealing with critical data, like county data, there’s obviously some questions about security. So, like, how did it come about? What kind of apprehension was there, and how did sort of the county overcome those?
Hollie Poole: Sure. So, I think we really needed a quick solution for processing invoices. There are so many that it becomes daunting. And if you have to enter each one manually, it’s just, it’s a lot of data entry.
So, we were all very positive about it because we knew this was going to save us so much time. So, everybody kind of jumped on board with that part relatively quickly. We didn’t have a lot of pushback with that. The one part of it that was a little bit, I don’t know, we were a little apprehensive about it at first was the AP automation portion of, you know, sending those payments to a third party.
And when we implemented, there wasn’t the option of just the capture by itself. So that was something we did have to get everybody on board with. But once we explained it, it was like, gosh, you know, the burden of, you know, that payment processing is off of us now. We just have to create the file.
So that was, it was a win both ways.
Josh Henderson: So really, it’s just a matter of getting things in front of people, showing them, oh, this will make your life easier. Absolutely. You will want this in your day to day. So, and that’s really great. Now, you know, we mentioned earlier how tight knit a community it is down there in in Pickens County. So how has having all these departments working together from the same dashboards, you know, how’s that improved this idea of collaboration and decision making within the county?
Hollie Poole: Yes. It’s been great. If they need to know something in between, you know, scheduling their monthly reports, they can just hop on their dashboard and see what we’re seeing and if they see something that you know, they’re like wait a minute, I don’t know what that is, they can call and we can look at the same thing with them and walk through it together and that’s still keeping our you know, we all like to go sit in somebody’s office and say, hey. Let’s talk about this. Well, it’s kind of the same thing if we can look at the same product there.
Josh Henderson: So, you mentioned scheduled budget reports, proactive problem solving. How has access to these sorts of reports changed the way your departments operate?
Hollie Poole: Those reports have been really great for us. Before we moved to this software, our finance director was having to pull reports monthly and then email them individually to the departments. And if we wanted to send out anything else, we would have to manually build that each time, send it out separately. So, I mean, it took a lot of time.
Now within my role, I created an outstanding purchase order report that it goes out monthly and then we can stay on top of those invoices. Like if we see a project’s complete, but oh wait, we haven’t received the invoice, or where is that invoice? Is it sitting in somebody’s inbox? We’re staying on top of it instead of letting it go a couple of months before it’s done.
Something else cool we did with scheduled reporting, our water department had asked for, they were like, are there any notifications within Tyler to show us like, you know, work orders that aren’t finished or anything like that? And we couldn’t really find a specific notification that would pop up but we were able to schedule a report for them that populated daily. And they could go in there and say, okay, well these aren’t done. They can send them to the person that needs to take them, or we need these to stay in the queue a little bit longer, but they’re getting that report every day so they can see exactly what’s happening.
Josh Henderson: Very cool. It sounds too like there have there been iterations throughout? Like, you’re creating those efficiencies. Like, in a way, you’re kind of, developing these solutions to fit the needs of the county as you go.
Hollie Poole: Absolutely.
Josh Henderson: That’s great. I’m sure our listeners will love to hear that as well.
I guess kind of speaking to this idea of working with outside vendors, you know, with auditors, residents. I know you mentioned not necessarily working with residents in person like that, but how have you seen automation improving accountability and transparency with auditors, with vendors and residents as well, if you can speak to that?
Hollie Poole: Yes. We can see, you know, who has or needs to approve a requisition or an invoice without missing anybody because that’s automated. We can tell very quickly where an invoice is in the process, if a vendor needs confirmation of a payment, if the department needs to know, do we even have the invoice yet?
Overall, that digital trail really allows for a clear audit path when we’re when it’s requested and we’re not chasing, you know, physical signatures.
Josh Henderson: And so, for virtual credit card payments and faster processing, is that is that also something that you can speak on a little bit as well?
Hollie Poole: Absolutely. So, we can see anything that goes through that AP automation payment process. We can see that within the software as soon as it happens. So, we can see, oh yes, this vendor got this virtual credit card, it’s been completed, or it’s still hanging out there and it’s been three days. Maybe we need to reach out to them and see if they can go ahead and process that. Or if there’s a problem, we can reconcile that pretty quickly.
Josh Henderson: That’s great. There’s obviously a lot of really great things happening down in in Pickens County. But what advice would you give other counties or local governments who are maybe looking to modernize their financial operations, modernizing their systems just generally speaking, moving to the cloud, taking on, artificial intelligence solutions, implementing automation, stuff like that. What would you what kind of advice would you give them, if they’re just starting on that journey?
Hollie Poole: The biggest thing I would say is to make sure that you can provide a purpose driven motivation that resonates across your organization. We need everybody to be on the same page as soon as that goes live. If you can give those employees a clear explanation of why we’re doing this, what our reason is, that transition can be so much easier to stay positive through because you’re going to have hiccups, you’re going to have those learning curves. But if everybody knows why, we can all stay positive through that.
Josh Henderson: Sounds like transparency is imperative in all of this. Very good. Now lastly, I just wanted to leave with sort of a future looking question.
Where do you still see opportunities for Pickens County to become even more efficient in the next few years, whether that’s five, ten years down the road? I know we can’t predict the future. We can’t predict what kind of technology solutions will be available to us down the line, but are there other areas where AI or automation could play a bigger role? What can you say to that?
Hollie Poole: I think our biggest opportunity is to build on our current platform. We’re still I mean, we’re, you know, a few years into using the software, but we’re still learning capable of. So, we want to build on that and we’re currently looking into adding the inventory module and we’re hoping to integrate that into accounts payable and purchasing within a year’s time of implementation.
So, I think that that’s a big thing for us is just really staying motivated to learn the software. There’s just so much that can be done with it. And I’m hoping this year to do the preliminary asset process that we weren’t using before just as a, you know, better utilization of the software.
Josh Henderson: And as you start to, you know, get more familiar with the software, find out new areas where you can create those solutions, we will have you back on here to chat about it because this has this has been really great that I feel like our listeners will take a lot away from this conversation. So really appreciate you taking the time. Can’t wait to hear what’s next for Pickens County and hope to have you back on the show again soon.
Hollie Poole: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, modernizing financial operations is about more than upgrading systems. For Pickens County, it meant creating a more connected, transparent way of working, giving departments real time access to information, reducing manual effort, and using automation and AI to simplify everyday processes like invoice review and approvals. Holly shared how bringing finance, purchasing, and departments into a single platform has improved collaboration, accountability, and confidence in decision making across the county.
It’s a strong example of how purposeful modernization grounded in clarity, trust, and shared visibility can make a meaningful difference for both staff and stakeholders.
If you’d like to learn more about the solutions discussed in this episode, check out the show notes for additional resources. And we’d love to hear your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com, and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode.
For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.