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OT -Vol FD

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Doug - Iowa

Member
Hey all, some of you are on small volunteerfire departments, do any have a simple Excel spreadsheet for run reports? Our dept bought Firehouse, it never worked well on Vista and won't work at all on Win7. They want $250 to upgrade and tech support has been zero anyways, so we're looking for a simple spreadsheet that we can use to tally up the year's fire and EMS calls for the state report. When you operate on next to nothing for taxes you look to get by anyway you can. I appreciate the help, thanks.
 
WHY aren't the locals smart enough to realize there HAS to be a tax levy for some operating money for the FD? Do they want to be without adequate protection?

What about the insurance companies, I'm sure it's like it is around here, where an outfit working for the insurance co's inspects/surveys the equipment and capabilities of each FD and the insurance rates within each FD's jurisdiction are determined by their level of preparedness/equipment/capabilities.

Get the word out, get a petition going around for a vote on a reasonable mil levy.

Around here, it's often the opposite, with the small town/district FD's struggling to get rid of their funds before year-end. (A case of the OPPOSITE situation.)
 
Doug. Our VFD is using a web site named Your First Due.com. I don't know what they offer in their package. You might look them up and see if they can help.
 
I hear what you're saying, but the reality is until the townships vote to raise the tax rate we have to work with what we got. Actually, we are better off than most. We have good trucks and fairly new gear. But if I had a choice I'd rather put money into gear than that crappy Firehouse software that has never worked right from day one. It's made for a big department with admin staff, not 6 trucks and 18 volunteers that have day jobs.
Their office is 45 miles from our station and they can't even send someone up here to give a class on how to run thier own software.
 
I am not sure just what you keep up with. I keep up with expeditures (treasury) for our church. I used to use a spreadsheep i created. Last several years i have used quicken. Not expensive software, easy to use, works well for me.
Easy to create various reports.
 
Kansas Firefighters Information Reporting Service, KFIRS, handles it all here in KS.
Works real good, you just go to the web site, fill in the blanks and click save. They no longer accept paperwork so you must have internet service. The county has updated also and all reports are e-faxed to my email.
On each incident the times are recorded. Page out, enroute, 10-23, return to station and 10-8.
This really helps with the monthly and annual reports.
 
Does your state Fire Marshal's office have any reporting requirements? They should. They also should be able to tell you how to (cheaply) arrive at those requirements.

Previously, we had Firehouse too. Had to pay those high maintenance and support costs. Now, Minnesota has it's own web-based version of Firehouse that doesn't cost the FD a cent. (It cost the taxpayers to write it, of course) It works really slick! It tells you immediately if you enter something wrong - eliminates the email or phone call from the State asking what you were trying to do... It's designed that the officer in charge at a given call would sit down immediately after the call to fill in the report. Oh, and the state even went through and loaded the last couple years of history into the system. We can run reports on previous year's calls.

We still use a paper form (Excel spreadsheet) at the scene to gather info, names, addresses, vehicle information, etc. Let me know if you'd like a copy of that.
 
here in illinois the office of the state fire marshal had a program that gave departments a laptop computer with firehouse software to do their state reporting on. i dont know if iowa would do something like that but its worth checking in to.
 
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