Why Pomona Artesian Moved Its Water Billing Out of the Shoebox

After more than a century on paper and spreadsheets, our records now live where the next operator can pick them up.

Pomona Artesian Irrigation Company has delivered water from the same artesian well since 1912. For most of that time, the books were kept the way small water systems have always kept them: on paper, in a shoebox of receipts, and more recently in an Excel workbook. In 2026 we moved the company’s billing and accounting to BasicBMS, and I want to explain why we made that change, how it went, and what it means for you as a member.

A little about me

I’m Jeremy Bond, and I live here in the neighborhood. Years ago, as the people who had run the company for decades got older and needed help, I joined the board. Over time I took on more, first as a trustee and then as president, and when our long-time water operator retired, I stepped in to operate the system as well. In March 2026 I became a licensed water operator.

I also build BasicBMS, the software this post is about. That isn’t something we’re hiding, and it’s something every member should know.

A 1912 artesian well

Pomona Artesian’s water comes from an artesian well in eastern Washington, outside Yakima, that produces several hundred gallons a minute of natural flow. No pump is needed to bring it to the surface. The company serves 65 service points, 58 of them active connections.

The family that drilled the well in 1912 ran the company until recently. That is more than a century of one family’s care, and it is the reason the system is in the shape it is.

Accurate, but in one place

The old records were not wrong. They were kept with real precision. The problem was that they lived with the people who kept them.

That is common in older water systems. The people who run them often hold the job for 30 or 40 years. When they step back, what they knew goes with them, and the next person is left working out how the system runs from scratch. A water company cannot afford that. People need water every day, whoever is keeping the books.

So the goal was portability: records that can pass from one operator to the next, from one manager to the next, and to whoever handles billing and the books, without anything getting lost.

What changed, and in what order

First the meters. As the Washington State Department of Health and state water-resource rules have tightened, Pomona Artesian installed a meter at every service point and on the source itself.

Then the billing. Each member account was taken out of the billing workbook, written to its own record, and loaded into BasicBMS. We also brought over the previous year of payments, which gave every account enough history to start from. The new system also changes how your quarterly bill looks, and our How to Read Your Bill guide walks through it section by section.

What the move brought to light

Putting every account into one system made a few things visible that a workbook had hidden:

Payments made in advance. When a member pays ahead, that money now shows as a credit for future quarters instead of income for this one.
Discounts are applied the same way to every account they belong to.
Late fees and returned-check fees are tracked account by account, so nothing is applied twice or forgotten.

More than a billing system

Along the way, Pomona Artesian picked up the things a modern water company is expected to have:

This website, where we post water quality reports and notices.
A Facebook page for updates and outages.
Email at pomonaartesian.com, so company mail belongs to the company, not to whoever holds a job this year.
One phone number, (509) 902-0523, that can be routed to whoever is on duty.
Online bill pay in the
Member Portal, and optional
text alerts.
Accounting and finances kept in the same system as billing.

There is one more benefit that matters for a company our size. If anything changes in how Pomona Artesian is run, the company behind the software is still there as a resource. The next operator or treasurer won’t be starting from a blank page.

If you run another small water system and want the technical side of this move, I wrote it up as a water company billing software case study on the BasicBMS site.

What comes next

Pomona Artesian bills a flat quarterly rate per service point today, and that is what made the move simple. The meters are already in the ground. The next step is to read them reliably and use that data to find leaks and waste early, before they cost the system water it can’t spare.