NERIS onboarding checklist for small departments

Before onboarding

• Update your department’s contact information with your state fire authority. NERIS uses those contacts to reach your chief.
• Decide who will be your NERIS administrator. Often the chief or a records officer; this person adds users and enrolls software.
• Export your old NFIRS data if you don’t keep incident records anywhere else. It is not carried into NERIS.
• List your stations and apparatus with unit names, types and normal staffing.

During onboarding

• The chief approves onboarding when NERIS reaches out. Approval must come from the chief.
• Get your NERIS department ID — FD followed by eight digits — once your state fire authority approves it.
• Sign in as the administrator and add the members who need access.
• Choose how you’ll report: NERIS’s free data capture tool, or records software connected to NERIS.

Connecting records software

• Get the vendor’s NERIS Client ID. (Not your department ID.)
• Enroll the vendor on the Enrollments page in NERIS as an administrator.
• Enter your NERIS department ID in the software and run its connection test.
• Send your stations and units to your NERIS profile, if the software supports it, so they match on every report.

Your first reports

• Pick one officer to file the first few and write down the errors NERIS returns.
• Agree on who approves before anything is filed.
• Set a filing deadline that meets your state’s rules, and a reminder for it.
• Keep the NERIS ID for every filed report so corrections update the same record.