Many other renewal-tracking systems would have you “initiate” or “start” renewals for all your records before sending out letters. Civic Review differs in that new terms are created only when the applicant initiates the renewal. If you’re unfamiliar with how terms work, you can read more here.

Here are some key points about how Civic Review approaches the data:

In order for renewals to run smoothly, you’ll want to make sure all records are up-to-date. This involves closing out records that are expired and making sure that fees for next year will be applied correctly.

Go to your list of “Renewing Permits”. This is a list of everybody who started renewals but never finished. For each one you’ll want to decide what to do. You can complete the current term and stage fees (see more about that below) or you can close the record down by setting its status to “Inactive”.

Under “All Permits” you’ll want to setup the filters shown above. This generates a list of all the business that are expired. Each municipality handles these in a different way. We’ve observed best results when the city sends code enforcement out to issue warnings. After some period of delinquency, you should set the status of the record to “inactive”. One fellow client who handles business licenses has good results by sending letters notifying businesses that operating an unlicensed business is a misdemeanor. Seems like if you can justify using words like “misdemeanor” you’ll get a really good response from people 🤣. If you prefer to take a more lenient route, there is a way to setup overdue fees to be applied next time they renew – covered below.

You can setup letters to send out to expired licenses using certificate templates. Contact us for help setting up such a letter.

Understand that businesses that are expired in previous years will not be automatically notified and asked to renew again. Civic Review assumes records will only be renewed one term at a time, and if it already sent an appropriate amount of renewal emails back when they expired, it will not continue to do so.

When they renew, they do so for one year at a time. So in their portal, they’d be creating a new term when they renew, but they would then have to repeat the renewal process immediately until the record is up-to-date. To get around this, see the section below about Staging Fees.

Under “All” Permits, setup some filters so you can see who is expiring soon.

Also, add the column that will show you the fees due next term. It’s recommended you just giving this list a high-level look to make sure everything looks right based on fees.

Learn more about how to state fees for the next term