Process · 7 min read · Last updated
Almost every construction delay blamed on “the city” is really a tracking failure. The application sat incomplete for three weeks and nobody noticed. Comments came back and went to an inbox nobody was watching. An inspection was never booked. Permit tracking is the discipline of always knowing, for every approval on the job, what state it is in and who owes the next move.
What “tracking a permit” actually means
Most project trackers have one row that says Building permit — submitted, and it stays that way for two months. That is a record, not a tracker. Tracking means the row answers three questions on any given day: where is it, what is it waiting on, and who is holding it up. If the answer to the third question is “the city” more than a week running, it is usually wrong — the file is more often waiting on a revision, a missing document or an unbooked inspection at your end.
The useful mental model is that a permit is not a document you obtain, it is a process you keep alive. It has an application phase, a review phase with one or more comment cycles, an issuance, a construction phase gated by staged inspections, and a closeout. Each of those phases can stall, and each stalls in a different way.
The four ways losing track costs money
- Idle trades. A crew mobilized against a permit that was not issued is standby time you pay for and cannot recover. This is the most immediate cost and the easiest to prevent.
- A lapsed permit. Under Ontario's Building Code Act, a chief building official may revoke a permit where work has not been seriously commenced within six months of issuance, or has been substantially suspended or discontinued for more than a year. A permit obtained early for a project that then sits is a permit at risk.
- A missed staged inspection. Inspections gate the next trade. Cover up work that had to be inspected — footings before backfill, rough-in before drywall — and the remedy is to uncover it. That is rework nobody budgeted.
- Closeout held hostage. Occupancy and final sign-off depend on every permit on the file being closed, including sub-permits opened by trades. An open plumbing permit from a subcontractor who left the job six months ago will stop an owner taking occupancy, and it is a miserable problem to solve retroactively.
The pattern to notice: none of these four failures announce themselves. There is no alert when a permit goes quiet, no notice when an inspection was skipped. They surface weeks later, at the point where they are most expensive to fix. Tracking is how you find them early.
One project, many permits
The single biggest reason tracking breaks down is that teams track the permit when the job actually has several, issued by different authorities on different clocks:
- The building permit itself, and any revisions issued against it as the design changes.
- Sub-permits for plumbing, HVAC and electrical work, often pulled by the trades rather than by you — which means they are invisible unless you go looking.
- Demolition permits, where existing structure comes out.
- Road occupancy, hoarding and street cut permits from a completely different municipal department, usually with short terms and renewal dates.
- Sign permits, which arrive late in the job and are routinely forgotten until the sign is already fabricated.
- External approvals such as electrical safety authority notifications, conservation authority permits, or heritage and site plan conditions that must be satisfied before the building permit will even be issued.
These interlock. A conservation authority clearance blocks the building permit; the building permit blocks the sub-permits; a sub-permit inspection blocks a trade. A tracker that shows only the top-level permit tells you nothing about which of those links is the current constraint.
What to track for every permit
One row per permit, not per project. These are the fields that earn their place:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Application / permit number | The only reliable key when you call the department — addresses and project names get mistyped |
| Issuing authority and department | Road occupancy and building permits are different desks; knowing which one saves a wasted call |
| Status | From a fixed vocabulary, not free text (see below) |
| Date submitted / date last actioned | Age is the earliest warning sign — anything quiet past its review window needs a call |
| Review window | Ontario prescribes 10 to 30 business days depending on building class; see our guide to permit timelines |
| Outstanding comments | Count and substance — three trivial notes and one structural objection are not the same risk |
| Expiry / commencement deadline | The date the permit becomes revocable if nothing happens on site |
| Inspections passed / remaining | Which trade is cleared to proceed, and which is not |
| Next action + owner + due date | The field that turns a record into a tracker. Every open row has one |
Status labels that don't lie
Free-text status fields decay into fiction. “In progress” can mean it was submitted yesterday or that it has been dead for a month. Use a short fixed vocabulary where every value implies a different next action:
- Not started — scope identified, application not yet assembled.
- Assembling — collecting drawings and documents; the delay is yours.
- Submitted — filed and fee paid, review clock has started.
- Under review — confirmed picked up by an examiner.
- Comments issued — the ball is back with you; the clock effectively resets on resubmission.
- Resubmitted — revisions filed, waiting again.
- Issued — permit in hand; expiry and inspections now apply.
- Closed — final inspection passed and the file is signed off.
The distinction between submitted and under review matters more than it looks. An application sitting in an intake queue unassigned is a very different problem from one an examiner is actively working, and only one of them is fixed by a phone call.
Run a weekly permit review
Tracking only works if something forces the tracker to be updated. A standing fifteen-minute review, same time every week, covering every open row:
- Any row whose status has not changed since last week — why not, and is it past its review window?
- Any row with no next action or no owner — assign one before the meeting ends.
- Any permit expiring or reaching a commencement deadline in the next sixty days.
- Inspections needed in the next two weeks, checked against the construction look-ahead rather than against memory.
- New scope since last week that quietly created a new permit requirement — a changed entrance, a new sign, an added mechanical unit.
That last item is the one most teams skip, and it is where late-discovered permits come from. Design changes create permit requirements silently. Consultants who ask the right questions early catch them — see the questions permit consultants put to building departments.
Make the tracker feed the schedule
A permit tracker kept beside the construction schedule gets ignored. The permits that matter belong in the schedule as real activities with real durations: application assembly, the statutory review window, a realistic allowance for one comment cycle, and each staged inspection as a gate before the trade it releases.
Doing this changes the conversation with owners. Instead of “we're waiting on the city,” you can say the application is in its ninth business day of a ten-day window, one comment cycle is budgeted, and framing starts the week after the footing inspection. It also exposes float you did not know you had — and shows exactly which permit is the critical one, which is rarely the one people assume.
Where zoning relief is involved, plan for a different order of magnitude entirely: a minor variance runs on a committee calendar, not a review clock. Confirming zoning before the drawings are finalized is the cheapest scheduling decision on the whole job — our guide to Ontario zoning by-laws covers what to check.
Where Permits2Go fits
Most of what breaks a permit tracker happens before the tracker even starts: an incomplete submission that gets bounced at intake, or the wrong form for the municipality. Permits2Go takes a plain-English description of the project and finds, fills and assembles the exact municipal forms the application needs — so the first row in your tracker starts at submitted rather than at rejected, resubmitting.
For consultants running several jobs across different municipalities, that also means one consistent intake process instead of relearning each city's paperwork. The tracking discipline above is still yours to run — this just removes the most common reason the clock never starts.
Quick quiz: test what you learned
Three questions, all answered in this guide. Click an answer to check it.
1. Besides the status itself, what is the most useful thing to record against every permit in a tracker?
A status with no owner and no due date is a description, not a plan — the next action is what actually moves the permit forward.
2. Why does an issued building permit still need an expiry risk tracked against it?
Under Ontario's Building Code Act a chief building official may revoke a permit if work has not seriously commenced within six months of issuance, or has been substantially suspended for more than a year.
3. On a job with a building permit plus plumbing and HVAC sub-permits, what does tracking each one separately protect against?
Sub-permits and their inspections gate specific trades — one line item marked "permit issued" hides which trade is actually clear to work.
Skip the paperwork
Describe your project in plain English and Permits2Go finds, fills and assembles the exact municipal forms you need — for Toronto, Mississauga and municipalities across Ontario.
This guide is general information, not legal or professional advice. Permit requirements, by-laws and fees change and vary by municipality — always confirm the current rules with your local building department before you design or build.