Behind on NERIS? You're not the only one.

How departments ended up here

NFIRS stopped accepting new incidents in January 2026, and NERIS replaced it. If your records system wasn't certified in time, you had three options: switch vendors under deadline pressure, enter every report twice, or keep documenting in the old system and sort it out later. A lot of departments picked the third one. It was a reasonable call then and it's a problem now.

Two things made it worse. Departments that assumed their vendor was handling everything often don't have a NERIS account at all, since every department needs its own regardless of who files the reports. And NFIRS history doesn't carry into NERIS on its own, so the year of work sitting in your old system isn't going anywhere by itself.

If you want the full picture of what changed, start with the NERIS Resource Center or the NFIRS-to-NERIS guide. If you already know all that and just need to dig out, keep reading.

Why this needs fixing before it costs you money

Grant eligibility. This is the one that stings. Federal and state grant programs increasingly want to see current, complete incident data, and a department with a gap in its reporting is a department with a weak application. For most volunteer and small combination departments, one AFG award is worth more than several years of software.

State and ISO reporting. Your state fire marshal's office pulls from the national data. So does ISO, and your rating depends partly on documentation you can produce on request.

The data itself. Every call your department ran this year is a record of what your community needed and what it cost you to answer. Left in a system that can't submit it, that's a year of evidence you can't use in a budget hearing.

We do the legwork. You don't re-key a year of calls.

Our engineering team in Rochester handles the conversion. This is not a checklist we hand you.

We convert your NFIRS records to NERIS. Every incident you documented this year gets mapped to the new schema on our end. Incident types, times, units, locations, and personnel come across without anyone at your department retyping a report.

We pull in what you've already submitted. If members have been entering reports directly in the NERIS portal to stay afloat, we bring those records into RedAlert so everything lives in one place instead of split between two systems.

We use your dispatch data to fill the gaps. For calls that were never documented anywhere, we can pull times, call types, units, and addresses from your CAD system and generate the reports as a starting point. Your officers add what dispatch couldn't know rather than building each record from nothing.

We get you onboarded properly. Every department needs its own NERIS account with admins assigned, even if a records system files the reports. If nobody at your department has done that yet, we walk you through it. It usually takes under an hour, which surprises most people who've been putting it off. Our NERIS onboarding guide covers the full sequence.

The NERIS app files your reports. It doesn't run your department.

NERIS provides a free data entry app, and for a department with no records system it's better than nothing. But it does one job: getting incidents to the federal database.

It doesn't track who responded to which call for your LOSAP, stipend, or pay-per-call program. It doesn't hold training records or warn you before a certification lapses. It doesn't run your truck checks, your inspections, your preplans, or your scheduling. It won't produce the report your board wants in January or the documentation your ISO reviewer asks for.

RedAlert files your NERIS reports and does all of that from the same record. The call your crew ran becomes the incident report, the attendance behind your point program, and the response history behind your next grant application, entered once.

See the whole platform