How to create Agencies, Permits, and Inspections

Never forget what the city requirements are again by onboarding your Agencies.

Introduction to Agencies, Permitting, and Inspection

For builders in sprawling metroplexes with wide service areas, city permitting and inspections can be a real headache for the staff. Often, the most experienced builder on the team retains what needs to be done in their head, but the office staff whose role exists to support the field teams has to scramble to find what inspections are required and when they need to be called in. The newer the employee is, the harder it is for them to anticipate what the needs of the city are and get the information they need from the team to take action.

You can make their lives easier and avoid delays if you templatize this in the agency's section of Poologics. 

Onboard Agencies As You Go

Once you've created your project types, you're ready to start onboarding your agencies. Usually, the most commonly used agencies (or the ones that are the biggest headache) are onboarded on the first call (Startup Call). That said, some builders have a much larger service area than others or they are new builder and haven't built pools in all of the cities that they will service, so they need to onboard this data as they go, which is great news because you can onboard Agencies as you go. Since it works like a template, you only need to do it once. After onboarding that jurisdiction, it will be available for all future projects.

How Inspections work with the Project Template

In the project creation workflow, you'll choose your agency for the project. If your project is a new construction, we only provide the permits and inspections for that city for that specific project type. Once you configure customize the project's job board to define the scope of the project in step 2 of the project creation, you'll then select your agency on step 3 of the setup. 

When you select your Agency and permit type, the inspections that are related to that city and permit type will be applied to your job board as subtasks of their related phases. For example, if you have a Deck Bonding inspection, that will be applied to the Deck Preparation phase as a subtask. The Deck Preparation phase will stay in a "Close Out" status until the subtask "Deck Bonding Inspection" will be marked as "Passed". Once it's passed, the Deck Preparation phase will be complete. We require that the inspection subtask is passed before the builder closes out the parent phase (Deck Preparation). This requirement ensures that the inspection subtask is not forgotten.

 

How to onboard Agencies, Permits, and Inspections

Check out the video below to see the full workflow and get some tips and tricks.

 

Tips and Tricks

  1. Start with the agency that has a permitting and inspection format that is most similar to other cities. If you handle it in this order, you can duplicate the agency, change the name and contact information of the agency, and save yourself a lot of time in onboarding the cities. If you have multiple project types, make sure that you onboard all of the permits and inspections per project prior to duplicating. It will save you a great deal of time.
  2. Add the Agency's permit portal URL to the website field. This will provide a link for you to click in the projects that opens the portal in another tab to check permit statuses or submit for an inspection.
  3. Fill out all of the contactor information in the agency's permit pdf, and then upload it to the agency. When you need to pull a permit in that agency, your team can download the half-filled out permit application, finish filling it out for that project, submit it, and then upload the permit application to the project.
  4. Create a Dashboard Widget that shows you open Permitting Tasks across all of your jobs.