FAQ
Questions councils ask.
Grouped by who tends to ask them: contract managers first, then the procurement and IT security questions that follow. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
The product
What it does, and what it deliberately does not.
What problem does Verdue solve?
It replaces the spreadsheet and the email inbox that most councils use to track whether contracted maintenance happened. Instead of approving an invoice for 180 services on trust, you have a live map of every site, its status against the schedule in the contract, and a verified record behind each completion.
What counts as a "site"?
Anything with a boundary you maintain: a park, a reserve, a sportsfield, a streetscape, a road corridor. Corridors matter here: they are long thin strips rather than parcels, and systems built around parcels handle them badly. Verdue stores real PostGIS geometry, so a corridor is a corridor.
How does Verdue know a job is overdue?
From the maintenance frequency configured for that site’s category during implementation, measured against the last verified completion. Category A parks on a fortnightly mow go amber before they go red, on thresholds set to your contract terms rather than ours.
Does Verdue score or rank our contractors?
No, by design. Verdue reports factual counts and rates with the sample size beside them, and states nothing at all where the sample is too small to support it. Judging contractor performance needs knowledge of contract context and site difficulty that software does not have. That judgement stays with your contract manager, and Verdue does not supply a score in its place.
Can we log resident complaints in it?
Yes. An issue is logged against the site it concerns with severity, category, description and photographs, tracked through a status workflow, and closed against the service that resolved it. When a councillor asks what happened with a complaint, the answer is on one screen.
Contractors
How the businesses on your contracts fit in.
Do our contractors have to change how they work?
They keep working the way they do now. What changes is how the record reaches you: instead of a photo folder and an email, their software submits a verified completion to your portal automatically.
What if a contractor does not use Verdue for contractors?
They are not excluded. Contractors using Verdue for contractors are connected with a signed webhook. Other software submits through the same documented interface. Contractors with no software at all are set up with manual completion entry during onboarding. The council portal is built for councils and does not require your contractors to buy anything.
Do contractors pay to submit to the council portal?
No. Contractors submitting completions to your portal are not charged by us. If a contractor separately chooses to use Verdue for contractors to manage their own jobs and proof of service, that is their own subscription and their own decision.
Can a contractor see another contractor’s work?
The portal is designed so that each contractor sees only the records they supplied, with the full picture across contractors available only to council users. That separation is part of the verification required before real council data is activated.
What stops a contractor logging a job they did not do?
The boundary check stops the common version: a job logged from the depot, the truck or the wrong site. The recorded GPS position is tested against the site polygon, and position, time, operator, service type and photographs travel with the record. Deliberate falsification is a different problem: positions arrive inside records submitted by the contractor’s own software, which Verdue trusts, so a recorded position supports review but does not prove the work was done. What Verdue adds is one consistent record across every site and contractor, which is what makes anomalies visible. How corrections, retention and audit controls work is agreed and verified for the live service, and we do not yet claim an immutable audit trail. Falsifying records is a breach of the terms every account operates under.
Data, security and procurement
For the people who have to sign it off.
Where is our data stored?
The council portal is currently a demonstration on example data, hosted on Vercel with no live council database. The live council portal is proposed to run on AWS in the Sydney region (ap-southeast-2). Some supporting services sit outside AWS, including web hosting, maps, error monitoring and push notifications, so we do not claim that every part of the service processes data exclusively in Australia. A live proposal includes a provider register covering each service, its purpose, data categories and locations.
Is Verdue IRAP assessed?
No. Verdue has not been independently assessed or certified. There is no Verdue IRAP assessment, penetration-test report, ISO 27001 certification or SOC 2 report. The live council portal is proposed to run on AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2). A provider’s assessment covers the provider. It does not assess Verdue’s application, configuration or operation, and we will not imply otherwise in a tender response. If your evaluation requires independent assurance, tell us early so its scope and evidence can be settled before a live service starts.
Can another council see our records?
The application associates each record with a council and scopes data access to the signed-in user’s council. End-to-end isolation, including exports and write permissions, must pass verification before real council data is activated. The demonstration is not evidence that every production access boundary has passed.
What will you provide our IT security team?
Start with the security page, which sets out what is demonstrated and what still needs evidence. We have internal architecture, data-flow and procurement drafts that support a review. They are not independent assurance reports or approved policies. Ask us which documents can be supplied, their scope and their review status, and send us your assessment questionnaire. Please do not send credentials, personal records or sensitive security evidence through the general enquiry form.
Who owns the data, and what happens if we leave?
Our position is that compliance evidence is the council’s record. The demonstration includes service histories and PDF and CSV reports, but those exports are not yet a complete exit package. Data ownership, licensed material, retention, corrections, deletion and the export you take with you are agreed in writing for the live service before it starts.
Getting started
What adopting it involves.
How long does implementation take?
We plan for four to six weeks from GIS handover to go-live and confirm the timeline in your proposal. The bulk of it is importing your parks and reserves data, configuring maintenance frequencies per category, and onboarding contractors. We do that work. Councils do not self-serve through a setup wizard. Real council data is accepted only after the activation and security review described on the security page.
What do you need from us?
Your GIS data in whatever form you already hold it, your contract terms for service frequencies and categories, a list of contractors with a contact each, and about 90 minutes with the person who knows how the contracts are written.
Is there a free trial?
Not a self-serve one. The council portal is currently a demonstration on example data: a populated sample council you explore with a login we supply. Seeing your own sites needs your boundary data loaded, which is part of a scoped pilot. Ask about either when you get in touch.
Can we start with one contract and expand?
Yes. Prove the model on a single contract or one department, then take it council-wide when you are ready. Expanding does not require a renegotiation.