The Top Five Reasons You Need a Licensing Solution

What Is a Licensing Solution?

A licensing solution lets you create and manage license applications, renewals, payments, inspections, and contractor credentials for service providers through a centralized portal. The portal easily integrates with other applications for increased customer service and cross-departmental collaboration. Enhancing productivity within your office via a licensing solution allows you to increase your output without adding staff, which helps increase profitability to provide the best services to your community.

Top Reasons to Use a Licensing Software Solution

Here are the five reasons we will cover: 

• Legal compliance
• Streamlined license management
• Avoiding financial loss
• Efficient business operations
• Maintaining a competitive advantage

1. Legal Compliance and Safety

Adhering to laws and regulations is vital to the success of a local government. It ensures the integrity of the municipality and gives residents peace of mind and trust in its local leaders. Obtaining the necessary licensing and permits helps to safeguard public health and safety. Furthermore, maintaining a legal operation helps create businesses with sustained success in the community. Noncompliance can delay or stall licensing approvals, which stifles economic growth, slows customer service, and imposes health and safety concerns within the community.

Licensing solutions help ensure health and safety codes and licensing requirements follow applicable regulations while speeding up processing time via centralized data sharing and can automatically validate applications, manage inspections, check for compliance, and flag issues and discrepancies.

Agencies are often juggling a ton of notes, paperwork, and PDFs saved in various hard drives or physical locations, making it difficult to find historical information needed to carry out administration services. A business licensing solution centralizes your data and allows admins to quickly look up parcel, building, and suite levels and gain insights into related info, licenses issued, code violations, past inspections, service provider information, adjacent property info, and more. Manual coordination of tasks and notes can also lead to missed inspections and overlooked expiring licenses. An intuitive color-coded task management dashboard and calendar can keep you updated on daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. This helps quickly identify and address in-progress, pending, and expiring tasks like pending inspections, expiring licenses, open-code complaints, and past-due items. A licensing system can offer inspection scheduling and in-the-field options like photo uploading, note storing, and automatic document generation.

Using licensing software also helps to ensure legal compliance within your community through its robust functionality and integration capabilities with other systems, such as with ICC and municipal codes of ordinances. No more copying and pasting codes into your documents or overlooking crucial changes to municipal code!

Furthermore, a digital application speeds up processing time and allows for the online submission of business applications for 24/7 convenience, features enhanced tracking abilities for added visibility and control, and can automatically generate renewal notices and invoices and process payments, which aids in completing requests to ensure legal compliance, while increasing revenue and efficiency. These online licensing systems integrate seamlessly with permitting, code enforcement, planning, zoning, and fire safety modules for increased collaboration, profitability, and issuance of licenses and permits.

2. Streamlined License Management

Managing licenses and permits is demanding, especially if manual paper procedures or outdated digital programs are in place. These unsustainable systems create collaboration difficulties, require laborious data entry, and make finding paperwork not located in one centralized location seemingly impossible.

Without the integration and automation capabilities of up-to-date licensing solutions, manual work chips away at your time, including going back and forth with applicants to gather info, differences in types of licenses needed for various industries, and inefficient tracking of license entitlements that are necessary to ensure applicants are complying with the stipulations of their permit of license.

Applying a licensing solution to your daily operations will streamline your process and help you easily create and manage license applications, renewals, payments, and more. In our system you get access to cloud services. Your records are all located conveniently in a single location and are easily searchable, making tracking, follow-ups, and renewals effortless. Furthermore, online submission capabilities ensure you get all the initial information from the applicant. The above benefits increase productivity and significantly reduce the time it takes to issue a license.

3. Avoiding Financial Loss

As was previously mentioned, effective and accurate license and permit tracking is vital for community safety and profitability. Licensing solutions let you easily track and discover upcoming renewals, delinquencies, and compliance issues. Regarding safety, appropriately licensed businesses adhere to local regulations concerning their structure and company practices. Unfulfilled requirements could make your municipality liable for any accident or misconduct that affects residents, making timely renewals essential.

The cost of noncompliance goes beyond monetary penalties. Unauthorized businesses lose credibility with their customers and other companies in the area, which reflects on your municipality.

With readily available licensing and permit data, you can provide residents with the best services and amenities while avoiding financial loss.

4. Increased Revenue

As previously mentioned, a licensing solution streamlines your operating procedures by allowing online submission and seamless integration with other systems. These improvements create the efficiency your team needs to ensure your community is open to growth.

The first advantage is being able to capture lost revenue. Examples include: charging a reinspection fee in the field for a no-show, capping the amount of plan review revisions without an additional fee, providing accurate fee assessments, and more.

Secondly, automatic licensing renewals and payment processing will ensure you aren’t missing out on potential and immediate revenue gains.

Thirdly, increasing productivity and the time it takes to process licenses will promote business growth and economic development. One of the ways to enhance efficiency is through a reduction in your administrative workload. Having all your permits and applications in one easy-to-access location, with accurate search capabilities, makes tracking, renewals, and verification readily available to simplify tedious tasks while improving communication and collaboration between departments. Business licensing software also automates many manual tasks, including assigning tasks and sending documents to the correct departments.

5. Competitive Advantage

When local businesses find success, it’s beneficial for your community. Increased commerce creates additional revenue for your community via local sales tax, and it puts more money back into the pockets of the residents who own and work at these businesses, which creates even more commerce. Reputable establishments also bring residents from around the area to your community to shop, eat, etc., helping to make your municipality a tourist attraction.

Businesses need to be quickly and appropriately licensed to ensure success. Following regulations keeps its customers safe and avoids violations, including OSHA and health code infractions, fostering trust and credibility in the community. Trusted businesses in trusted communities become profitable and attract other companies to the area, and they can open storefronts in different local areas, which creates additional success for everyone.

Consider a Licensing Software Solution

A licensing solution is a thoughtful way to increase efficiency and revenue within your local government. Added productivity and profitability help you better support your residents. Furthermore, you foster the long-term success of your community, develop trust with your residents and those in surrounding areas, and build a better place everyone can call home for a long time.

Learn more about CivicPlus’ licensing software