Forerunner changelog withforerunner.com

New

Forerunner users with manager permissions can now update specific account settings directly in their dashboard Settings. With this feature, users have more control over their account's configuration without having to contact the Forerunner team to make revisions. These updates can be made in real-time as communities experience changes in regulations. Users with management permissions can edit their freeboard required for properties in the SFHA, their SI/SD project tracking period, the cumulative SI/SD tracking period length, and the SI/SD project threshold and improvement value adjustment ratio for their communities directly in the Account tab of their Forerunner Settings.

Improvement

Our users leverage Forerunner's log feature to track public and resident interactions on a per-property basis for record-keeping and cross-functional communication. Communities participating in the Community Rating System (CRS) also use logs to document advice given to residents to receive credit for element 362a. Property protection advice. Per user requests, we have improved the logs export to now be a .CSV file. Previously in Forerunner, logs could only be exported in PDF format. We've updated this feature so that you can export logs into an editable dataset that you can filter and organize as needed. The new format allows users to better analyze, compile, and report their resident logs data. For more information on logs, visit our Help Desk documentation.

New

One of the most valuable features for our users is Elevation Certificate Data Extraction and Error Detection which enables us to transcribe the EC fields directly and identify issues against 100+ checks. While Forerunner’s data transcription accuracy is incredibly high and reliable, sometimes the transcription isn’t perfect. There are instances where these mis-transcriptions will flag an incorrect error or warning on the EC. We built the Transcription Editor with these challenges in mind. This feature allows users to manually add and delete values in each line item of the EC’s extracted data. If users notice a mis-transcription of the data or a value that wasn’t picked up by our software, they can now easily update the values to reflect the exact field contents in the EC.

To learn more about how to update transcriptions in your Forerunner app, visit our Helpdesk article.

New

All document types uploaded to your Forerunner account are now visually displayed as colored dots on your dashboard map. You can easily toggle between document types in your Map Layers panel to view uploads on properties across your entire account. This allows you to get a general understanding of which properties have a particular type of document.

To view different document types as dots on your dashboard, open your Map Layers Panel and click the Documents section. From there, you can toggle each document type on and off.

New

Forerunner now supports file types beyond Elevation Certificates. We make it easy to upload other documents so you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of your community. If you have documents such as Surveys, V-Zone Certificates or Floodproofing Certificates, you can add them directly to properties in your Forerunner dashboard! To learn more about how to upload documents to a property, check out our Helpdesk documentation. To further customize your default list of document types, reach out to support@withforerunner.com.

New

In riverine communities, Base Flood Elevation, or BFE, must often be interpolated, making it more difficult for these communities to track the BFE for a given property. To better enable our riverine partner communities, and to create greater flexibility for all of our users, we have built a new feature to allow you to manually add custom BFEs to a property.

We see this feature being leveraged in several ways:

• If you can interpolate an appropriate BFE for a property, or find a BFE through a different approved source, you can now add this to the property in Forerunner.
• If a property is intersected by multiple zones, you can update the BFE to ensure that it reflects the BFE of the zone where the structure itself sits.
• If the BFE of the structure varies from that of the parcel BFE provided by FEMA, you can now change the BFE to reflect that of the structure itself, rather than the parcel.
• Often, community ordinance requires them to use the "best available flood data." If better BFE data is available then that provided by FEMA, you can change the BFE to the best available data.

To learn more about how to update and edit BFEs in the Forerunner system, check out our Help Desk article on Flood Zones and BFEs.

Improvement

Residents and community members can search for flood-specific information for any property within your account boundary through Forerunner’s improved public website. This public-facing website provides a comprehensive summary of flood data that reduces the workload for members of your team and helps to increase your flood risk communication reach. Residents can navigate to the public website and search for information and Elevation Certificates on a per-property basis without having to contact your team. You and your team can also easily email and print public property profiles to share with community members.

Each community will get a custom URL for their public website. We recommend that you bookmark this URL and connect it to your website for CRS credits. Your custom URL will have your community name and state. For instance, Bay Head, NJ’s URL is bayheadnj.withforerunner.com. By linking your Forerunner public website to your community’s website, you can receive CRS credits for sharing flood protection information with the public. If you're unsure how to do this, just reach out to us at support@withforerunner.com. If your community had an existing Flood Information Center, the same URL will be retained, so you don't have to worry about re-linking!

Check out 352.c on Forerunner’s CRS Guide for more information on credits.

When visiting the public website through the URL, anyone can enter any address within your account boundaries on the homepage to access a public property profile. The public property profile details essential flood information, warnings and provides visitors with any visible elevation certificates associated with that property. You can click the Print page button to print and share a paper copy with residents.

Click the Elevation Certificates button in the top right-hand corner to view and filter all publicly-visible Elevation Certificates uploaded to Forerunner for that community. Clicking the Get Help button lets members of the public submit requests for assistance from your team. A designated member of your team will receive an email when someone submits a help request and it will be recorded as a log in your Forerunner dashboard.

New

It’s now easy to manage team access and activities in the Forerunner dashboard by granting variable permissions to account users based on their role. With this new feature, user roles determine the access levels users have to perform and manage activities in Forerunner.

New Forerunner roles include:

• Manager: full product functionality and can invite/modify users
• Member: full product functionality but cannot invite/modify users
• Creator: full product functionality, cannot invite/modify users and cannot delete data
• View Only: limited product functionality and cannot invite/modify users

Learn more about our user roles here.

An account’s Manager users can add a new user, suspend users, and alter existing users’ roles by navigating to Settings and clicking on the Team tab. This tab is only visible to Manager users. Manager users are able to add new users and select their role by clicking the blue + New User button in the righthand corner of the Team tab. They are able to assign the roles of Manager, Member, Creator and View Only. Each user’s role is visible under the Role heading on the Teams table.

Manager users can select roles for other users by clicking the Actions button on the right side next to the desired user’s name. Then, click Change role to manage the user’s role. To learn more about each role, you can click Learn more about our user roles button at the bottom of the modal. Be sure to click Save if you modify a user’s role! Manager users can also suspend existing users by clicking the Actions button and then Suspend to remove the users from the account.

New

We’ve added some additional features to improve your team’s coordination and enable better property tracking with the Global Activity Feed and the Property Activity Feed. You can now track actions taken on a per-property basis by any member of your team.

Global Activity Feed

The Activity Feed is located under the  Address Search Bar at the top left corner of your Map. This feature tracks all property interactions performed by members of your team in chronological order. The interaction could include updates to Elevation Certificates, SI/SD costs, logs, and comments. These are organized by date and include a link to the property address. Click the address or activity in blue to quickly access the property and view the change.

Comments for each property made in the Property Info Panel are also displayed in the Activity Feed.

To minimize the Activity Feed, press the upward-facing arrow in the top right corner. To view more actions, click View More.

Property Activity Feed

You can also view property-specific activities and interactions by navigating to the Activity tab in any Property Info Panel. Similar to the Global Activity Feed, the Property Activity Feed tracks all creations, deletions and updates to Elevation Certificates, SI/SD costs, logs and comments for that given property in chronological order.

You can also add comments in the Activity tab to make notes for that property. To delete your comments, click Edit and then Delete Comment.

New

We’ve added a printing option for users who want to share paper copies of property information with residents or the public. You can now print out the public profile for any address in your community. This feature is particularly useful for those who interact with non-user stakeholders or want to store paper files of property information for their records.

To use this feature, click the Share public profile button on any property within your account boundary. Then, click the View public profile button at the bottom of the modal that opens. This will open a new page into the read-only public facing page that you will be printing. In the top right corner of the page, you’ll see a Print page button that will allow you to review the page before sending it to your printer.