Guide
Switching NERIS reporting software
A lot of departments chose in a hurry, against a deadline, in 2025. Eight months of daily use tells you things a demo could not. Here is what to check before you move, including the case for staying where you are.
First, the thing that makes this safe
Incident reports filed through the NERIS API live in NERIS, under your department. They are not held inside a vendor and they do not disappear when you stop paying one. Authorization to file on your behalf is granted by your department and can be withdrawn by your department.
That single fact is what makes switching a normal decision rather than a hostage negotiation, and it is worth knowing before anyone tells you otherwise. What is genuinely at risk is the material that only ever lived in the vendor's own system.
Five things to check
Work through these before you take a single demo. Two of them regularly end the conversation on their own.
Can you export your own incident data, yourself, today?
Not "will they send it to you if you ask" — can you get it out without a support ticket. Try it before you have a reason to. A department that cannot answer this has a dependency it has not measured.
What is actually stored in NERIS versus only in the vendor?
Reports filed through the NERIS API live in NERIS, under your department, and are not lost when you change vendors. Anything that only ever lived in the vendor — drafts, attachments, internal notes, custom fields — is the part that can go.
What is the notice period, and when does it renew?
The common trap is not price, it is an auto-renewal that quietly passes while you are deciding. Find the date before you start evaluating anything.
Who at your department actually has NERIS admin?
Authorizing new software is done by a department admin inside NERIS. If that person has left and nobody replaced them, that is the first thing to fix, whatever you decide about software.
What is the real complaint, and would switching fix it?
Sometimes the software is fine and the problem is that nobody was trained, or that one person is filing for everyone. Switching does not fix either. It is worth ten minutes of honesty before a procurement cycle.
Do not switch if
- Your renewal is more than six months out and nothing is actually broken. Migrations cost attention you could spend on training, which is more often the real fix.
- One person files everything and they are fine with it. That is a resilience problem, not a software problem. New software will not distribute the work by itself.
- You are mid-grant-cycle with reporting commitments you have not read. Read them first. We are not going to characterize what any grant program requires.
Where FireMic fits, and where it does not
We are a voice-first way to file a NERIS incident report: you talk through the call, the report gets structured for you, and you review and correct every field before anything is submitted. It files through the NERIS API.
We are not a full records management system. If you need scheduling, inventory, apparatus checks, training records, hydrants, and payroll in one place, a full RMS is the right shape of product and we are not it. Some departments run us alongside one.
We deliberately do not publish comparisons of other vendors' products. We have not used them in your department, and a competitor's marketing page is not a basis for telling you what their software is like. The questions above will tell you more than any grid we could draw.
The options we know about · How authorization works · What FireMic costs