Elevation Certificate Error Detection

Forerunner's Elevation Certificate Error Detection functionality flags potential compliance issues with your ECs in order to assist you in your review processes.

Please note that this is a beta version of our Error Detection feature, which is still undergoing development before its official release. Beta features are offered "As-Is" and do not carry any warranties. If you have any questions, please contact us at support@withforerunner.com.

How it Works

Forerunner's Elevation Certificate (EC) Error Detection feature uses compliance-based logic to surface "issues" in your ECs. Each of the issues is generated by comparing data from the FIRM and from the EC to identify possible discrepancies between the two. The feature also reviews the EC to ensure it meets basic compliance requirements. Our EC Error Detection Issues Guide provides a detailed review of the fields reviewed and logic applied during error detection.

Error detection is generally done automatically when an EC is first processed. Note that error detection will also occur when an EC is updated or if underlying FIRM data is overridden. This also occurs automatically as part of the processing that occurs when documents or data are updated.

Evaluation Criteria

At this time, we only evaluate residential elevation certificates that were created after a specific date.

The cut-off date for creation will vary from account to account and is often based on the FIRM information available. This is important, because it ensures that we're comparing only the most relevant data; comparing a new EC to an older FIRM that has since been changed, for example, would not give you an accurate understanding of the EC's degree of compliance. Our goal is to only review those ECs that are relevant to your current FIRM and to meeting your current CRS goals.

To review or update the cut-off date for EC Error Detection on your account, please contact us at support@withforerunner.com.

Important Limits to Review

This feature provides supplementary EC review and should not fully replace your compliance-checking process. There are also several items on an EC that can not be checked for compliance automatically and that should still be reviewed manually. Please see our EC Error Detection Issues Guide for additional details on what is and is not checked during our automated EC Error Detection process.

Finding ECs with Issues

You can determine if an EC has issues by reviewing the Issues tab in the Document View of an individual EC. ( Learn more about how to find and view your ECs here.) If an EC has issues, the tab header will include the number of issues in parentheses and each of the issues will be listed for your review.

You can also determine if an EC has issues in the following ways:

By Email Notification

When uploading an EC, you should receive a confirmation email that the EC has finished processing. At this time, you may also receive a second email notifying you that the EC you've uploaded has issues. You can click the link in this email to view the EC in your Forerunner dashboard.

Note that If your ECs have been uploaded by the Forerunner team as a bulk EC upload, you will not receive these notifications.

By Filtering for All ECs with Issues

After your ECs have processed, they will show on the Certificates page of the Forerunner dashboard. Here, any EC that has issues will have a yellow indicator showing the number of issues present on the EC. If no indicator is present, the EC does not have any issues, or it may not have met the evaluation criteria and therefore was not reviewed for issues.

You can filter the Elevation Certificates table for only those ECs that have issues.

Click the Filter button in the upper-left hand corner of the table.
Check the checkbox next to Has issues.

This will filter the table down to those ECs that met our evaluation criteria, have been evaluated automatically by the system, and are known to have issues.

Reviewing EC Issues

In the Document View of an Elevation Certificate, the issues identified by our Error Detection Feature are listed on the first tab of the viewer, the Issues tab.You’ll also notice that the Issues tab shows a number in parentheses next to the issues label. This number indicates the number of issues that were identified on the EC.

The EC fields that have issues will be listed, showing the EC field name and the value that was included on the EC. Each issue will be color-coded to indicate the type of issue present:

Orange issues indicate a warning. These are items that will likely not result in a gig during a formal FEMA EC review. However, they may be indicative of other data or compliance issues that you may consider looking into.
Red issues indicate an error. These are items that likely will result in a gig during a formal FEMA EC review. To avoid this, the community should consider getting an edited or updated EC with these errors corrected.

Click the issue in the list to get a more detailed review of what was found during the error detection review.

Ignoring Issues

We recognize that you--our partner communities--have many priorities and that ECs can be very diverse! It's possible that the issues we have found are not important to you, will not apply to a given situation, or have already been addressed in some way. To help you manage you EC review workflow, you can ignore issues that you do not wish to address at this time. To ignore an issue, click the ... menu to the left of the issue you wish to ignore and select Ignore issue from the dropdown menu.

Ignored issues will turn black and will no longer be counted in the issue count on the Issue tab or on the Elevation Certificates table. They will, however, remain listed on the Issues tab. You can unignore an issue at any time by clicking the ... menu to the left of the issue you wish to ignore and selecting Unignore issue from the dropdown menu.

Reporting Incorrectly-Identified Issues

Our EC Error Detection feature often relies on the transcription of the data in an EC to complete a full compliance review. This means that if a transcription is incorrect, it can trigger an error or warning that, upon your review, may be incorrect. You will know this has occurred when the value listed for the field in the Issues tab shows a different value than the one seen on the EC.

The Report issue button allows you to report issues that seem erroneous to the Forerunner team so that we can fix the issue, if possible, and also improve our product. Learn how you can report these transcription errors.