Coppella & Associates

Now in its 22nd year, Coppella & Associates, headed by Tom Coppella, specializes in municipalities, serving 11 of 15 townships in McKean County and more than 100 municipalities in northwestern Pennsylvania and New York. The company's new feature offers web site design geared toward advertising on the internet. Businesses can use their custom-designed web sites - which are updated monthly - to list and show their available products and services, to promote sales and specials and to provide information about their products, eliminating many phone calls. Besides its own web site, Coppella has done web sites for Bradford City Water Authority, Bradford Dimension Products, and the borough of Lewis Run. Coppella & Associates uses the Microsoft Windows Visual Basic and Access 2000 Database Design for customers specializing in commercial point-of-sales and municipal utility billing. One of the company's projects involved transferring the Bradford City Water Authority over to a radio read meter system, replacing the old method whereby authority employees physically read meters, wrote down readings and gave the lob to office clerks, who then transferred entries onto the computer system. Under the radio system, the data is automatically downloaded into the reader and audited to reflect current billing. The auto read and radio read system are available for water, sewage and refuse billing. Coppella worked from 1967-69 as a system analyst for Bradford National Bank, where an installment loan system was developed. He was responsible for developing water and sewage billing for the City of Bradford and MIS Inc., the general ledger service bureau system for ESB Group. From 1969-78, Coppella served as vice president for MIS, which serviced certified public accountants and accounting firms throughout western Pennsylvania and western New York with finished computerized financial statements. Founded in 1979, Coppella & Associates developed accounting systems for certified public accounting firms to use on their own personal computers, as well as oil industry firms including Lloyd-Smith Co., Pennsylvania Oil & Gas, LK Drilling and Commonwealth Oil & Gas. Coppella's son Troy handles the web page department and provides some of the programming for the newer systems. Both father and son emphasize getting to know clients and their needs. "Basically what we like to do is sit down and work with them, see what they're doing now, and how to do it better.