Frequently Asked Questions

What is Permit Sheriff?

Permit Sheriff is an evidence and decision-control layer for permit operations. It organizes project evidence, accepted facts, project history, blockers, risks, next actions, and supported external workflows into one governed permit record. It is not a government portal, permitting authority, legal service, or generic AI chatbot.

Is Permit Sheriff just an AI assistant?

No. AI can assist classification, extraction, summarization, and grounded analysis, but consequential product state is designed around evidence, structured records, deterministic rules where appropriate, human review, authorization boundaries, and auditable actions. Permit Memory, Preflight Review, Approval Map, Project Ledger, timeline intelligence, and Sheriff Report do not depend on a chatbot inventing project truth.

What happens after I upload or import a permit package?

Permit Sheriff processes the submitted evidence, organizes the permit record, identifies relevant findings and risks, updates Permit Memory, and presents the results with supporting context and next actions. Processing status is shown so an incomplete analysis is not presented as a completed result.

Is comprehensive jurisdiction coverage included?

No. The current offer focuses on supported document analysis, source-linked findings, correction review, and project records. It does not promise comprehensive or continuously maintained jurisdiction requirements. Inspect the trust state and cited scope of any local context returned with a result.

A location match, directory profile, or discovered website does not establish verified requirements. Missing local guidance remains unavailable or unverified; a correction notice supports the specific project it addresses.

Does Permit Sheriff guess when it does not know a jurisdiction?

No. Permit Sheriff is designed to fail closed on unknown or ambiguous jurisdiction guidance. It does not silently substitute rules from a nearby city, county, state, province, or country. When verified local guidance is unavailable, the analysis remains evidence-based and identifies jurisdiction-specific guidance as unverified rather than manufacturing certainty.

How does Permit Sheriff reduce the risk of inaccurate AI findings?

Permit Sheriff is designed around evidence-backed analysis rather than unsupported AI answers. Submitted evidence, structured permit facts, source provenance, confidence, and deterministic rules are used where appropriate. When information is incomplete or uncertain, Permit Sheriff is designed to surface that uncertainty instead of presenting a guess as fact.

What is Permit Memory?

Permit Memory is the persistent permit and project context created from accepted evidence and structured facts. It helps teams retain the history and current state of a permit instead of reconstructing the story from scattered documents, emails, and one-off AI conversations each time they return.

What do Preflight Review, Approval Map, and Project Ledger do?

Preflight Review evaluates the recorded package against available governed requirements and evidence. Approval Map shows the parties and stages that can gate the project. Project Ledger records requirement drift, follow-ups, commitments, impacts, and how the project reached its current state. Together they create a reviewable operating picture instead of a single opaque readiness score.

What do risk, readiness, and financial exposure numbers mean?

They are operational decision-support signals based on the permit record and available evidence. They are intended to help teams prioritize attention and understand potential exposure; they are not guaranteed savings, legal damages, accounting conclusions, or promises of a particular permit outcome. The signals can change as the underlying permit evidence and status change.

What happens when Permit Sheriff is uncertain?

Permit Sheriff is designed to show uncertainty rather than manufacture certainty. Missing evidence, incomplete processing, unverified jurisdiction guidance, or findings that cannot be responsibly quantified should remain visible as limitations rather than being converted into an artificial all-clear result.

How are important actions controlled?

Important actions are designed to remain reviewable and permission-bound. Supported workflows can separate preparation, explicit human authorization, execution, provider response, and verification. A provider response is not automatically treated as proof that the intended external state was successfully verified.

How is one customer's information kept separate from another customer's information?

Permit Sheriff scopes protected customer data to the authenticated organization and enforces authorization on the server. Evidence access is permission-controlled, and protected evidence storage supports encryption and integrity checks. Customer-facing identifiers are not treated as permission by themselves.

How does the Autodesk integration work?

An authorized customer can connect Autodesk, select the appropriate project and supported document version, and bring that evidence into the same Permit Sheriff analysis workflow used for direct uploads. Permit Sheriff detects the selected project's capabilities: native Forma or BIM 360 Issues where supported and permitted, or a new findings report in a writable Autodesk document project. Read-only projects remain usable for analysis with results retained in Permit Sheriff. Source documents are not overwritten.

Will Permit Sheriff automatically change my Autodesk project?

No. Permit Sheriff is not designed to blindly publish machine-generated findings into a customer's Autodesk project. Writeback is built around controlled, verified findings, current capabilities and permissions, and authorized customer actions.

Does Permit Sheriff have an API for other software or agents?

Yes. Permit Sheriff's broader partner platform can expose scoped REST and MCP workflows for supported permit analysis, contractor readiness, result retrieval, and supported webhooks. The current self-service Direct API plans are intentionally narrower: their issued credentials persist contractor.verify and jurisdiction.resolve, and authentication adds only the minimum partner.read permission needed alongside those two capabilities. Direct API subscriptions are commercially separate from the Operations application plan.

What does a ready packet mean?

A ready Permit Intelligence Packet is an assembled work product, not municipal approval or a finding of universal compliance. Read the analysis status, evidence, unresolved items, and coverage limits. A useful completed assessment can identify blockers; failed processing is not a favorable result.

The application, REST API, and MCP reuse the same analysis and evidence services. Available operations depend on your permissions and purchase channel. Discover the deployed tool catalog; do not assume a tool or a verification receipt exists. Missing proof is unavailable, not verified.

Does Permit Sheriff guarantee permit approval?

No. Permit Sheriff supports evidence analysis, workflow intelligence, risk visibility, and reporting. Government agencies and other authorities make final decisions, and users should verify material requirements and findings before relying on them for filing, legal, engineering, or other professional decisions.

Is Permit Sheriff legal advice?

No. Permit Sheriff provides operational permit intelligence and evidence-backed decision support. It does not replace a permitting authority, attorney, architect, engineer, code professional, or other licensed professional when their judgment or approval is required.

What happens if processing fails or takes longer than expected?

Permit Sheriff tracks processing state and is designed to distinguish incomplete or failed processing from completed analysis. The goal is to recover safely where possible and to avoid presenting a failed or partial analysis as a successful all-clear result.

Can I generate reports?

Yes. Sheriff Report and other report surfaces turn governed project state and findings into review-ready outputs. Generated content should be reviewed before it is filed, submitted, or shared externally as an authoritative statement.

How are payments handled?

Permit Sheriff uses supported payment and marketplace billing channels for eligible purchases. The checkout experience shows the applicable plan and billing terms before purchase. Channel-specific plans, including Autodesk purchases and direct API subscriptions, can have different allowances or commercial terms from the direct web Operations plan.

Can I cancel?

Yes. Customers can cancel future recurring renewal where a recurring plan applies. Access and any refund eligibility follow the billing terms and Refund and Cancellation Policy applicable to the purchase channel.