Inspection Updates are Happening

As mentioned in the January 2019 ePermitting Newsletter, we’ve made some changes to the inspection types available in ePermitting. 

We’ve heard for a number of years that there are too many inspections types which can make it confusing for contactors and homeowners when choosing inspections to be scheduled.
We worked with several building officials as well as the technical experts here at the Building Codes Division to:

• Consolidate duplicate inspection types
• Remove overly specific inspections
• Add a few missing inspections, including Radon Mitigation
• Create new inspection brochures with better instructions on inspection scheduling for the contractors and homeowners

The inspection changes will be pushed out to all ePermitting agencies on Saturday, April 13, 2019. 
In addition to making changes to inspections available for scheduling, we will be making updates to existing scheduled and/or pending inspections (remapping the retired inspections). This is necessary to keep the apps working properly and to preserve functionality in the OSM agencies for re-adding pending inspections for failed instances. Existing inspections will be updated according to the following criteria:

• The inspection is in a status of Pending or Scheduled
• The overall record is not in a closed status
• The inspection is not missing required information (some converted records may not include the information needed to properly remap affected inspection types)

Accela Inspector App: Inspectors will need to refresh system data within the app. Instructions on How to Refresh the Inspector App System Date.

For some OSM agencies, these changes may affect which inspections you have automatically pended at record creation. Following the 13th, if you’d like to review which inspections you have auto-pended for possible changes, please submit a ticket to the help desk via [email protected].

Due to the consolidation (we retired 160 inspection types) and remapping of inspections, you may find duplicates of pending and/or scheduled inspections. For example, 1118 Footing Drain and 1128 Foundation Waterproofing became 1124 Foundation Drain/Waterproofing. It’s possible that, if you had both 1118 Footing Drain and 1128 Foundation Waterproofing pended and/or scheduled, you might now see two instances (because both inspection types were mapped to 1124 Foundation Drain/Waterproofing). You can simply delete one of the instances (as appropriate). If you run into any difficulty and need more information for those inspections, you may request a spreadsheet of changes via the help desk.

Click here to find a PDF that details which inspections are being retired and which inspection type they will be mapped to, according to the criteria above. There is also a PDF with the new inspection types. You can find an updated version of the inspection brochure here.

For OSM agencies: Because only pended/scheduled inspections on active records were updated, if you reinstate a record, you will need to delete any pending and/or scheduled inspections and re-add the appropriate inspections. If you don’t do this, the scripting that adds a new instance upon a failed inspection, may not work properly.

As a reminder for those agencies that do their own administration within Accela, inspection types must match throughout all ePermitting agencies so that IVR and the apps will work. If you’d like to make changes to inspections please submit a help desk ticket.