What to ask a burn permit vendor

Every burn permit product demos well. A resident fills in a form, a permit appears, everyone nods. The differences show up three months later, in the parts nobody demos.

These are the questions worth asking before you sign anything.

Money

1. Where does the fee land? Ask whether payments settle into the municipality's own account, or into the vendor's account to be remitted later. This is a treasurer question, not an IT question, and the answer changes your reconciliation and your risk if the vendor disappears.

2. What happens when someone abandons the payment page? People start a payment and close the tab constantly. Ask to see what that resident sees when they come back an hour later. If the answer is "they start over," expect a lot of duplicate applications.

3. Can staff issue a permit at the counter? Someone will always walk into the hall with cash. If the software can't record that, you now run two systems and your numbers never match.

Conditions and bans

4. How fast can you declare a burn ban, and what does it do? Time it in the demo. Then ask what the single action actually triggers: does it notify existing permit holders, or only change a webpage?

5. Where do the conditions come from? If the fire risk and air quality readings are typed in by staff, they will be wrong by the second week of July. Ask which station, and how often it refreshes.

6. Can you run an advisory without a full ban? Most bad days aren't ban days. A system with only on/off pushes departments into declaring bans they don't mean.

The permits after they're issued

This is where most products thin out.

7. What does the resident get, and can they find it again in October? Ask to see the resident's view of a permit they got five months ago.

8. How do renewals work? Seasonal permits expire. Ask whether anything notices, and what the resident receives.

9. Can you find every permit within two kilometres of an address? This is the dispatch question. When a call comes in, someone needs to know who was permitted to burn near there — quickly, on a phone, at night.

10. What does an inspection workflow look like? Agricultural and large burns often need eyes on the site first. If the product has no state between "applied" and "active," that whole category falls back to paper.

The exit

11. Can you export everything, today, without asking? Ask them to show you the export in the demo. A vendor who has to "look into it" is telling you something. Your permit records are municipal records; you should be able to get them out in a format your clerk can open.

12. What happens to the data if we leave? Get the answer in writing, in the agreement, not in an email.

The pattern

Eleven of these twelve questions are about what happens after the permit is issued. That's deliberate — issuing is the easy part, and it's the part every demo is built to show.

The permit program is the year, not the transaction. Evaluate the year.