Government — Screen Workflows

Onboard the Government team

Before any agency staff can touch a Government screen, the tenant admin has to turn the package on and get at least one person into a role. This is a one-time setup per tenant, not something repeated per employee.

The admin starts by activating the Government package from the tenant's add-on settings — without this, every Government screen shows a paywall and no agency user can open them, regardless of role. Once active, the admin opens Roles for the first time; because the store is empty, TotalApp seeds the six default role templates (Department Director, Permit & Zoning Officer, Field Inspector, Records / FOIA Officer, Grants Administrator, Fleet & Dispatch Coordinator) automatically, so there's no need to define a role from scratch before adding people. From there the admin moves to Public Personnel & Bargaining Unit Roster, adds each employee, and assigns one of the seeded roles (or a custom one) to each. A person only gains access to the screens their role's capabilities cover — a Field Inspector who hasn't been given the funds disbursement capability will never see the disbursement action, even if they can browse the grants screen.

Set up jurisdictional & fiscal master data

Once staff and roles exist, the next job is populating the three Operational Setup screens — every other Government workflow (permit review, field inspection, grant disbursement, 311 triage) eventually points back to a jurisdiction, a fee schedule, or a budget line defined here, so doing this out of order means those later screens have nothing real to reference.

Start with Jurisdictions, GIS Zones & Electoral Districts: an administrator enters each district, neighborhood, zoning map and electoral ward the agency is responsible for, along with its governing decree. Next comes Statutory Fee, Fine & Tax Schedules, where the finance or clerk's office publishes the official catalog of permit fees, fines, occupancy charges and service tariffs, each tied to the law or council resolution that authorizes it. Finally, Public Budget & Revenue Source Directory is where the analytical budget accounts — general-budget transfers, own revenues, earmarked funds, tax lines — get their codes, so that money coming in through a fee schedule or a grant disbursement can be posted to the right line.

Run an AI compliance diagnostic on a master-data record

Master data drifts over time — a boundary decree gets amended, a tariff cap changes, a budget line gets restructured — and nobody wants to manually re-read every piece of legislation every time a record is touched. Each of the three Operational Setup screens has a built-in diagnostic for exactly this: pick a single boundary zone, fee schedule, or budget account and have it checked against the legislation on file.

For example, a clerk reviewing a zoning boundary opens that zone's diagnostic panel and runs a search over the decrees and zoning-law text already stored in the system, which surfaces the passages most relevant to that specific zone. The clerk reads the compliance summary that comes back — it calls out things like an overlapping boundary with a neighboring zone, a service area left unassigned, or a spatial code that was never confirmed — and then acts on whatever the system recommends: fixing the record, escalating it to the Department Director, or leaving it as-is if the flag turns out to be a false positive. The same pattern applies on the fee-schedule screen (checking a tariff against its legal ceiling) and the budget screen (checking an account code against the analytical structure).

Who can do what

Frequently Asked Questions