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100% Paperless 100% Online Building Department

Is your Building Department 100% Online and 100% Paperless?

  • YES

    Votes: 5 41.7%

  • NO

    Votes: 7 58.3%
  • Total voters
    12
jar546 said:
One of the factors that you haver to look at is the cost of paper records retention, storage facilities, degradation of paper, space and labor costs for records requests. The world is moving forward with technology whether we like it or not and paper is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Look at the costs of office supplies. My budget was $12,500 per year for all of the paper, writing utensils, toner, copier leases, folders/jackets, permit cards, etc. and we are now less than half of that, coming in just over $5,000 per year. I just had to transfer $17,000 to the Clerks office so they could manually scan all of our old records and place them into Laserfische. Now that we are paperless, I don't have any expenses like that anymore. Storage of full size blueprints and being able to find them has always been more expensive than anyone wants to admit.

Whatever the cost is to work towards electronic, it is worth it and part of doing business in today's world. Once you realize the benefits and ease of operations, not to mention the detailed records, you will never, ever look back. Architects, Engineers and contractors love the new process because they only have to print 1 copy to keep on the jobsite. Some jobsites are even more advanced on large projects because I get there and they hand me a large tablet on a shoulder harness and I have access to the prints in PDF right at my fingertips and can zoom right in as far as I need to.

Another benefit is our inspectors can use our SmartGov app and bring up any document if they need to. The level that we are working at now vs the level I worked at in the past with paper only has benefits that outweigh any of the costs. It is what it is and you just have to move forward without excuses.If yoiu want to make it happen, you will.
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I did an analysis just on storage of paper records and for the minimum retention time of 20 years, it would cost me $5,000 for each bankers box of files to have them professionally stored and we produce 11 of them a year (small municipality).

I think this is something a lot of us are forgetting about when we look at our permit prices. It's not just the operation of the department we need to look at, but also the records management and retention.
 
So it appears that some have moved forward with the process as budgets allow. No one has just cold turkey, flat out changed and became paperless or online capable over night, It takes some planning.

Here we would have to have paid outside IT, some of you have a department of about 1-5 employees doing that, which makes it a bit easier I suspect.

Kudo's to you that have progressed!:)
 
Pcinspector1 said:
So it appears that some have moved forward with the process as budgets allow. No one has just cold turkey, flat out changed and became paperless or online capable over night, It takes some planning.

Here we would have to have paid outside IT, some of you have a department of about 1-5 employees doing that, which makes it a bit easier I suspect.

Kudo's to you that have progressed!:)
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We had permitting software but the only thing online was inspection request. We literally went to 100% paperless overnight because the software that we have had that capability. It took about 2 weeks to get the kinks out of the system (big kinks) and the ability to set up the online payment so we took cards over the phone which is now strictly prohibited.
 
We have been slowly moving in this direction for the past 5 years or so. What started this was a threat analysis which dictated that a fire would be a significant loss to our current records (100% paper at the time with some digitized). So we made decisions to slowly mitigate this risk. COVID definitely sped up the final phase of electronic submissions, but the rest was already done.
 
tmurray said:
We have been slowly moving in this direction for the past 5 years or so. What started this was a threat analysis which dictated that a fire would be a significant loss to our current records (100% paper at the time with some digitized). So we made decisions to slowly mitigate this risk. COVID definitely sped up the final phase of electronic submissions, but the rest was already done.
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Not to sound like a broken record but I will never, ever work somewhere that is not 100% digital. It just does not make sense anymore. Paperless is certainly the way to go.
 
jar546 said:
Not to sound like a broken record but I will never, ever work somewhere that is not 100% digital. It just does not make sense anymore. Paperless is certainly the way to go.
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Yes. Once we switched over inspections to digital, it saved me like an hour a day in paperwork.
 
Also, It didn't really cost that much money. Especially over the long term. When we were looking at new software or technology replacements, we just made sure it supported the ultimate goal of online services.
 
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