When you reschedule an inspection there is NOT an automated message that gets sent from Accela to let the customer know that the inspection has been rescheduled. 

You need to let them know that you have rescheduled the inspection. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t an Accela option to send an automated email when you use the Reschedule function/button – We will suggest the ‘automated email at Reschedule option’ to Accela, because it certainly would be nice to have.

For more information on Resulting inspections, see Resulting Inspections so your trips count.

​The ePermitting team is starting to take a look at the newest versions of Accela to determine the best version for our next Accela upgrade. We’ll begin the upgrade process in the next couple of months which will start with the ePermitting team doing some extensive testing in our Dev environment. The testing and upgrade will progress through our other environments and we’ll eventually be asking the daily agency users to do some testing before we upgrade production. We are hopeful to have the Accela upgrade complete by late spring and will keep you updated as the project progresses.

Due to the high demand for Accela 101 Basics Training since Covid began, we have added a weekly training session (3-part series) to assist agencies who have lost their in-house experts/trainers or are needing a refresher of the basics. We have a lot of agencies that have lost their experts or are dealing with recent or high turnover, so training to ‘hit the ground running’ is now being offered. Submit a ticket to the Kayako helpdesk to request information on the current training schedule and availability.

TIP #1 - Take a moment in the new year to work with your local IT team at your agency to whitelist the Kayako email domain, to add *.kayako.com to your agency whitelist as a safe sender.  Doing this will assure that your agency receives all Kayako replies on any tickets submitted.  Otherwise some replies will end up going to your junk mail, you will miss our replies, which will delay our attempts at providing you with timely solutions, information, and guidance.  On many occasions, agencies have reached out saying they have not heard on a ticket they submitted, when nearly every time, we have already replied but they did not receive the sent reply as it went to spam/junk.  

TIP #2 - Please do NOT ever include the helpdesk email (epermitshelp.BCD@dcbs.oregon.gov) as a cc on an internal/external email discussion.  Emails sent to this address automatically create a helpdesk ticket – so with each reply in your email discussion with a contractor or coworker, a new ticket is potentially created, multiple times over.  Also, if forwarding an email discussion to the Kayako help desk for assistance, please summarize the issue you are seeking help for at the top of the email when submitting.

TIP #3 - The Kayako help desk and email is for jurisdictions subscribing to ePermitting – this is not the same help desk as for contractors or outside parties, so please do not provide this help desk email to your external customers.  Instead please feel free to provide them with the contractor/external customer help desk email at oregon.epermitting@dcbs.oregon.gov - or they/you can call 503-373-7396 for immediate support.

We will soon be implementing Virtual Folders in all OSM agencies. Virtual folders are way to further categorize documents. This will be a phased roll out starting with permit/review record types in the Building module.

Virtual folders will not duplicate the document types but, instead, are meant to further help identify/categorize documents both in the back office and in ACA.  In the back office the File Name and Document Name are both shown in the document record list. Unfortunately, the same is not true for ACA. In ACA we are only able to display the file name (the actual name of the uploaded file).

Back Office:

​To associate a virtual folder with a document:
​
1. When in the add document form, click on the hand picker icon for Virtual Folders.

​2. A new window will pop up within the form. Check the box in front of the folder you’d like to associate to the document and click the OK button. 

​3. Notice that there is an Add button. This will allow agency users (any users that have access to add documents) to add a virtual folder “on the fly”. Virtual folders, once added here, would be available to associate to any document that references the same virtual folder group (we’re starting with just one virtual folder group for the permit and review record types within the Building module in this first phase of roll out). We caution you to be judicious in creating folders. One of the intents here is to make it easier for customers to find certain types of documents that they may have difficulty sifting through, especially on larger projects.

​4. When a Virtual folder is associated, it will appear in the Virtual Folder column in the record document list. In the record document list, users may sort by clicking on the column header.

​5. In ACA, it will appear like this and customers have the ability to sort by clicking on the column header:

We will be adding an additional parallel review task to Commercial Mechanical records. We’ve had requests to add a new review for some time. In the past we’ve recommended using the ad-hoc workflow task for these reviews, however, we’ve heard from several agencies that they need this additional review every time. In order to preserve flexibility, without bogging down the model, we’ll be adding a review task simply called “Additional Review”. When advancing the workflow to “Ready for Plan Review”, the user will have the ability to select (or deselect) the Additional Review task. 

If both reviews are activated, the workflow will always progress to the Completion task after the reviews are complete (even if “Approved for Completeness” is not selected for the Mechanical Review). If “Additional Review” is not activated, users will still need to select “Approved for Completeness” for the Mechanical Review if they would like the workflow to move to Completeness rather than to Permit Issuance.

If you require more than one additional review, you will need to use adhoc workflow for the other(s). 

This will be a phased project, with other record types receiving the same enhancement in the future.

It’s finally ready! Over the past year, the Oregon BCD ePermitting team has been developing and testing the Android version of the Oregon Inspector App. We are planning to release the app the week of August 23, 2021, via email, to all jurisdictions. The Android version functions in the same way as the iOS version, but for committed Android users, the change in operating system and design will be a very welcomed change. Much like the release of the iOS version last year, we anticipate a few issues may arise that need to be addressed. Please continue to use the ePermitting Help Desk email epermitshelp.bcd@oregon.gov to submit any issues or call 503-373-7396 so we can work with our app developer to resolve them as soon as possible. 

Any inspectors wishing to download and use the Android Oregon Inspector App can do so by following the instructions provided in the email we will send out next week. The Oregon Inspector App is not available on the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store as it is not a public application. 

We have just finished our first round of testing a video inspection enhancement to the Oregon Inspector App.  The app will allow:

• Real time video inspection, with verification of the contractors’ location
• Photo capture during real time video inspections
• Ability for contractors to submit photos (separate from live video inspections) to a record, with location verification
• Push notifications to the contractor app, so that inspectors can give quick status dates about arrival time, or other information
  ​

Our first round of testing went very well, and we expect to begin piloting video inspections in several jurisdictions during September.

Hoping that everyone is now getting into the groove with the new user interface that came with the recent Accela upgrade, and finding that the bumps are smoothing out. If you have not had a chance to read the upgrade documentation (Delegate User changes, Global Search changes, Known Issues with the upgrade) – take this opportunity to read this extremely important documentation.

• Report Page naming – as a result of the upgrade, we realized a bug where our report page naming was not displaying – instead users are seeing, Report 1, 3, 4, and 5. You may or may not see all of these depending on which modules your agency is using and/or that you have permissions to.  Designations are as follows:

                 o Report 1 = BUILDING
                 o Report 3 = PLANNING
                 o Report 4 = PUBLIC WORKS
                 o Report 5 = ONSITE

If you lose track or forget, once you open a report page, there will be a category named for the module-specific reports – so that’s a quick way to ID what report page you are on.

Unfortunately, we have many communities in Oregon dealing with the aftermath of fires and other natural disasters. In order to assist jurisdictions to better track rebuilding efforts after a disaster, we will be rolling out the following additions to OSM:

• A checkbox on ALL records to indicate it is a post disaster permit.
• A dropdown on ALL records to indicate the name of the disaster  (jurisdictions can let us know when an item needs to be added to the dropdown.)
• A text field on ALL records for additional disaster-related info (e.g.,FEMA case number.)

On Structural/ 1 & 2 Family Dwellings ONLY, a dropdown to indicate full/partial rebuild.

In addition, we will be adding reports to help categorize the post disaster data.

Following our recent Accela software upgrade we wanted to touch base with our delegate users. There were some significant changes to delegate functionality in the new version and your feedback as a daily user is important to us. Please take a moment to complete the survey, it’s short and shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. We would like to receive survey responses by the end of the day this Friday, August 20.

Accela Delegate User Survey

     8. All Modules: ​Owner field was added to the Record List in all OSM agencies.

If your agency has the Planning Module and would like to begin to issue standalone TREE permits, please submit a helpdesk ticket to epermitshelp.BCD@oregon.gov. There is a submittal form and configuration required to set this up. This record type is also the first online application type available for Planning – however, offering the Tree permit application online is optional.

For agencies that might be interested in offering the Tree permit application online, an address will be required for online application – so applications for undeveloped parcels will have to be applied for directly with the agency.  The application provides the option for the Applicant to indicate a specific Tree Application Type and to further line item the Application Type along with the Type of Tree(s) which can be very helpful details for agencies with a Tree Management Program.

You can also submit a helpdesk ticket to learn more about this new Planning TREE Record Type.  Look for new documentation soon to come to the Kayako Knowledgebase on TREES as well.

​When customers schedule an inspection online through Citizen Access, they are not forced to select an existing Pending inspection to schedule.  They can simply click a link to schedule an inspection, select from a list of inspections associated to the record type, and then schedule.  When this happens an extra Pending inspection of the same type is left on the record, which can cause problems when it is time to Final the permit.  To work around this issue, beginning on Jan 20, 2021, we deployed an enhancement for all OSM agencies where the extra Pending inspection on the record of the same type scheduled is automatically removed by script, cleaning up the record.  If there are multiple Pending inspections of the same type that was scheduled, only the first Pending inspection will be removed.  This enhancement applies to the Building, Onsite, and Public Works modules.

If your agency is in the process of any fee updates for the fiscal year – we are asking that you please work to get them submitted by Friday, May 14. Due to the sheer volume of agencies updating at the fiscal year (July 1st) and other projects that are currently in progress, the turnaround time on all the changes to include testing, could take up to several weeks.

The fee updates do not have to be all the way through the approval process or have completed BCD Notice, so we ask that you send the draft of your fees that is currently under review/in process. We can get all the changes drafted and then only have to make minor changes as needed upon approval.

If you wait to submit your fee updates, we may not be able to guarantee their availability in production for July 1.

If you have any questions regarding fee updates, please contact our helpdesk at epermitshelp.BCD@oregon.gov. ​

​Version upgrade testing continues for the ePermitting team. We are currently testing Accela version 20.2.2 in our training environment. We hope to finish our initial testing by the end of April and will then be upgrading the config environment and asking agencies to get in and do some testing as well. We are looking forward to performance improvements as well as some long awaited fixes! You’ll be seeing more information from us as we progress through our testing cycle.

​The 2021 Oregon Residential Specialty Code, 2021 Oregon Plumbing Specialty Code, 2021 Oregon Electrical Specialty Code all become effective April 1st. The code edition dropdowns for plumbing and electrical, as well as residential structural and mechanical record types will be updated with the new code editions effective April 1st, including defaulting those values to ‘2021’.

​The February 2021 ICC Building Valuation Data has been loaded into Accela for all agencies and will become effective and available for use on April 1, 2021.

ePermitting has recently received a few help tickets from agencies needing to provide a discount or credit to an applicant – there is a way to do this in the system using the PAYMENT functionality.  

1. Assess the fees in full and invoice them,  
2. Go to the PAYMENT tab, initiate a payment,
3. Select ‘Method’ = Credit Memo,
4. Change the ‘Amount’ to the amount you are wanting to credit or discount, 
5. Enter the ‘Payer’ = Credit Memo (there is no payer for this type of exceptional NON-CASH payment transaction),
6. Enter ‘Comments’ to record who authorized the discount/credit and any other important notes regarding the discount/credit being provided.
7. Submit > a Fee List will be displayed where you will determine what fee items you are applying the credit/discount to and for how much > Submit again to complete the payment
8. Retain the Credit Memo receipt for your Finance Department – they likely need to be made aware of the discount and what fees/accounts it was applied to
9. Print the Revenue Exceptions report under Financial Reports v3 and submit this with your nightly balancing reports to Finance

Important Note: Credit Memo exceptional payments should never be refunded as CASH – if voided, they look and act like cash – so anyone processing refunds needs to be aware of this when voiding fees that might have been fully/partially paid by a Credit Memo, or are voiding payments for any reason.

Please take a moment and learn about this and other Exceptional ‘Payment’ Types thru our Kayako Knowledgebase!

• March 15, 2021 City of Dallas added the Public Works and Planning modules including Code Enforcement.
• March 15, 2021 City of Hood River added the Public Works module.
• March 17, 2021 City of Hermiston and Philomath added the Public Works module.

Welcome to ePermitting!