Adding Property Documents

In this Article: 

Forerunner allows you to manage your flood and permit-related documents, like Elevation Certificates, by allowing you to upload all of the documents for each individual property to the property's Property Information Panel . There are two ways that you can easily add documents to a property:

Adding Documents to a Property from the Property Information Panel

You can add any type of document to the Property Information Panel of an individual property. To add a new document to a property:

  1. Search for the property address or click on the property in the Forerunner dashboard to open the Property Information Panel for the property.
  2. Navigate to the Documents  tab. 
  3. Click the blue button at the top right of the panel labeled  + Upload . 
  4. A pop-up modal will appear with instructions on how to upload documents to this property. Note that you can upload up to 10 documents to a property at a time. 
  5. Select the Document type  and Issue date  for each file. Note that this document type and issue date will show on the Documents tab of the property as a way to organize the property's documents. Please note that all Elevation Certificate issue dates will be extracted during our transcription pipeline and data extraction process. You will therefore not be able to select the issue date for an Elevation Certificate.
  6. Click Upload documents . 

A message should appear confirming that your documents have been uploaded and the documents should appear on the property's Documents tab. Note that Elevation Certificates will show as Processing until the data extraction process for the EC has been completed. This activity will show on your dashboard's Activity Feed  and in the property's Activity Log . 

Adding Elevation Certificates on the Certificates Page 

The  Certificates  page shows all of the Elevation Certificates for an account. You can add Elevation Certificates to your Forerunner account from this page and they will be automatically geolocated to the individual properties, so that you don't have to worry about finding each individual Property Information Panel . Note, though, that no other documents are shown on this page, nor can they be uploaded from this page.

To add an Elevation Certificate from the  Certificates  page:

  1. Click the blue + Add new button at the top right corner of the Certificates page. 
  2. A modal will appear with instructions on how to proceed. 
  3. A pop-up modal will appear with instructions on how to upload documents to this page. You can upload up to 10 documents at a time. Note that you will not need to select a Document type  and Issue date  for these files. The Document type  and Issue date  fields will appear greyed out because all Elevation Certificate issue dates will be extracted during our transcription pipeline and data extraction process. You will therefore not be able to select a document type or issue dates for these documents.
  4. Click Upload documents . 

A message should appear confirming that your documents have been uploaded and the upload activity will show on your dashboard's  Activity Feed  and in the property's Activity Log . At this time, ECs should also appear on the property's Documents  tab, but will show as Processing until the data extraction process for the EC has been completed. During the EC data extraction process, a blue banner will also appear at the top of your Certificates page, noting that your ECs are still processing. 

Once ECs are processed, you will be notified via email and an activity will be added to your account dashboard's  Activity Feed  and in the property's Activity Log  showing that Forerunner finished processing the document. If your ECs have issues found during our EC Error Detection process, you will be notified in a separate email, so that you can review the EC issues in greater detail. 

File Upload Specifications & Recommendations

Important Specifications:

  • At this time, we only accept PDF documents in the Forerunner system. 
  • For ECs specifically, data quality can impact the ability for a document to be processed in Forerunner. Check out our note on EC quality and possible extraction issues..
  • We do not use our file extraction tools to check for duplicate files, since there can be many reasons that duplicate files are being uploaded. If we receive duplicate files in the system, each file will be processed individually, independent of the others.
  • There are no specific file name requirements to upload a document into Forerunner. Instead, we rely on the data in the file, as well as the document type and issue date to properly extract, place, and organize your files.

To ensure that your files are in their most usable format, we like to share the following recommendations with our users:

  • PDFs should contain only one document per file. This is especially important for ECs, where we are able to extract data. If you have more than one EC per PDF, or you have many documents in a file to support the EC, we recommend that you split the file into individual PDFs.
  • If a single document is split into multiple files, please combine those files so that you are uploading a single, complete document. This is especially important for ECs, as we rely on multiple pages of the EC to properly extract data.
  • Ensure that your PDF pages are all facing in the correct direction before uploading. If you upload a PDF with upside-down pages, the pages will stay upside-down.

If any of the above specifications pose a challenge, we’re happy to work with you on a solution. Just reach out to us at support@withforerunner.com.

Bulk Uploading Elevation Certificates

We know that many communities have large files of historic elevation certificates that would be important to have in Forerunner. We're happy to do bulk uploads of an elevation certificates that you have gathered before your time as a Forerunner customer. If you wish to upload Elevation Certificates in bulk, please contact your Customer Success Manager at support@withforerunner.com. 

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