AI knowledge base for local authorities and council offices when someone asks about the 2018 resolution or a building file.

Official decisions, building files, meeting documents, contracts and correspondence with citizens and authorities in one place, every piece of information with its source. Who sees what depends on document type and role – the minutes of a closed session are not the minutes that are open for inspection under the municipal code. Before we start, we check whether your file storage, mailbox and records management system can be connected. The demo uses sample documents; whether the answers hold up becomes clear in the first weeks after go-live.

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Everyday question

“What did the municipal council decide on the traffic plan in 2018, and how did the vote go?”

The answer is in

Minutes of the meeting · extract of the resolution

1 Source in one click

Day to day

Sound familiar?

The neighbour comes in during office hours wanting to see the building file for the 2016 extension. The file’s downstairs in the archive, in three binders, and the colleague who looked after it has retired.
The mayor rings an hour before the meeting: what did the council decide on the traffic plan in 2018? The minutes are filed by year, and nobody remembers which agenda item it was.
The summer intern goes looking for an official decision on the network drive and suddenly finds herself in the folder with the personnel files.

Tuesday at seven, and the digger is already on site: while connecting the sewer for the extension in the lower village, the municipal works depot hits a water pipe that isn’t on the plan. The head of the municipal office is on the phone. The utility register is a PDF in a folder on the network drive, next to an older version with almost the same file name. The water rights decision for the local water supply dates from the nineties and is filed downstairs in the archive, in a binder with a pencilled label on the spine. The permit for the house connection from back then is in the building file, but under the previous owner’s name – nobody finds it under today’s address. The digger stands idle, and the builder logs the downtime.

Things people in this industry say every day.

Example questions

Questions from your day-to-day work

Three questions that come up day to day, and the document where you would expect to find the answer. In the demo you see this with sample documents; you test it with your own documents in the first weeks after go-live.

“What did the municipal council decide on the traffic plan in 2018, and how did the vote go?”
1 Minutes of the meeting · extract of the resolution
“Which conditions are in the building permit for the extension on this plot, and has completion been notified?”
2 Building permit · building file · notice of completion
“Which documents belong to this request for information, and by when must it be answered?”
3 Procedural file · deadline under the Freedom of Information Act

Documents

The documents that matter to you

Official decisions and procedural files under the AVG (General Administrative Procedure Act) – submissions and applications, minutes, file notes, findings, plus the proofs of service under the Service of Documents Act (Zustellgesetz)
Building files for each plot – application documents, minutes of the building hearing, building permit and the notice of completion as required by your regional building code
Meeting documents – agendas, motions, minutes and resolutions of the municipal council (in Vorarlberg and Salzburg, the Gemeindevertretung); kept separately, the documents of the closed sessions of the municipal executive board, town council and committees
Local spatial planning documents – zoning plan, development plan and local development concept, including the comments from the public consultation
Budget documents under the VRV 2015 (Austrian regulation on public budgeting and accounting) – budget estimate, annual accounts including the operating statement and cash flow statement, and the medium-term financial plan
Procurement documents – invitation to tender, bids and award record, plus the documentation the Federal Procurement Act (Bundesvergabegesetz) requires even for a direct award
Contracts and documents on the municipality’s own buildings, facilities and land – water and sewerage, lease and maintenance contracts, utility and sewer registers, water rights decisions and test reports
Correspondence with citizens, the regional government, the district authority (Bezirkshauptmannschaft) and associations, plus requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (Informationsfreiheitsgesetz) and the replies to them

Integrations

Connecting your systems

Your system stays as it is. One-click systems connect via your account; for the others we check before we start whether and how a connection is possible – until then, you simply upload documents.

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Pricing

What it costs

Basic package

from€500per month

Set-up fee €2,900 · excl. VAT

A flat fee per company. Everyone in your firm can use it – from reception to the partners – with no per-user licence. One-click connections are included in the set-up. Before we start, we check whether your industry-specific software can be connected; that connection is charged on a time-and-materials basis, agreed in advance.

Drafts as Word, PDF or email are included in the Premium package.

At the kick-off we agree on twenty questions together – along with the documents each answer should come from. At sign-off we go through them together and look at what the system does with them. What follows from that is set out in the quotation.

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Getting started

Where to start

Start with the meeting documents from recent years – agendas, minutes, resolutions – because people ask about them often, and you can decide straight away what counts as a public and what as a closed session. In the first weeks after go-live, ask about resolutions whose content you know, and check the sources. The building files follow year by year, scanned from the archive, starting sensibly with the plots where building work is currently going on. Leave personnel files out deliberately at the start, and add them only once the roles are in place.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Our building files are in binders in the basement, some of them as copies. How do they get in?

Scanned, by year or by plot. Pages without a text layer go through text recognition (OCR) in your instance, and you can upload whole folders at once. The system suggests plot, applicant and date; in the first weeks after go-live, try one building file to see how well that works with old copies and with binders that still bear the previous owner’s name. A person has to confirm whether a document is, say, a building permit or the minutes of a building hearing, because that determines who can see it later.

After the municipal election, half the council changes. How do we switch access over?

Through roles, not individual files: you assign each person to their function, and what that function may see is set per document type. When someone leaves, their role is removed, without anyone having to go through meeting by meeting. Anyone without access doesn’t get the content. During onboarding you can use a restricted role to see what comes back when someone asks about a closed session.

Can the system write the reply to a request for information for us?

It can pull together what the office has on file on the matter, with a source for each document, and turn it into a draft – as a Word file or as an email draft. You can look up the date the request was received if it’s on file; the system does not calculate the deadline or monitor it. Whether a document is to be released, or a passage in it redacted, is decided by the competent body, not by the system. And nothing is sent automatically: whatever goes out is still read and signed by someone in the office.

The audit committee wants the documents on a direct award from 2019. What happens if the award record is missing?

If the system finds no award record, it tells you so – and you can ask what there is on the matter: the bid, the invoice, an email to the company, the resolution that approved the project. The system does not create a record. That way you see early on where something is missing, rather than finding out in the committee meeting.

Our head of office works for two municipalities. Do the records stay separate?

Yes. Each municipality gets its own instance; there is no shared pool answering across both, and anyone who works in both offices has a separate role in each instance. Documents of a joint association – water, wastewater, civil registry – are held wherever the association keeps them; what your municipality has on file about them is in your records. Each municipality is billed for its own instance; the price depends on the connected sources, not on the number of staff.

Guides

Request a demo – with examples from Local authorities

In a 30-minute video call, we use sample documents from your industry to show you how questions are answered and what the source for each answer looks like. You don’t need any of your own documents for this.