The 10 Most Common Mistakes in Managing Municipal Registers

Local councils manage dozens of administrative registers and censuses: openings and activities, terraces, animals, associations, contracts, subsidies... Each of these contains necessary and valuable information for administrative management and political decision-making. However, in many cases, these registers end up being difficult to maintain, unreliable, or simply underutilized.

Below we review the ten most common mistakes we have detected after years of working with local administrations.

1. Managing the register with Excel, Access, or non-specific tools

The most frequent situation. Excel is a fantastic tool for many things, but it is not designed to manage an administrative register or census with a complex data model, multiple users, change history, and advanced functionality and control requirements.

What usually happens: poor quality data, loss of information, difficulty for multiple users to work simultaneously, no way to know who modified what, the file grows until it becomes unmanageable, and, moreover, everything depends on the person who masters the spreadsheet being available.

2. Poor quality data due to lack of validation during entry

When the system allows any data to be entered in any field, problems are guaranteed: names written in different ways, dates in incompatible formats, non-standardized locations, mandatory fields left blank...

The solution involves using forms with input masks, dropdown lists with predefined values, automatic validations, and fields with mandatory formatting. If the data enters incorrectly, everything that follows will be contaminated, including the analysis of this information.

3. Local files without security policy or backup copies

The register file is on someone's desktop or in a network folder without version control. There are no scheduled backups or, if there are, no one has checked that they work. One day the disk fails, ransomware enters, or someone accidentally saves over it, and goodbye to information. Furthermore, with a basic information system it is impossible to comply with the National Security Framework.

4. Not integrating the register with other municipal systems

The register exists, but lives isolated from the rest of the council's systems. It does not communicate with the case management system, with the census, or with taxes. Each system has its own version of reality and duplicated data.

The result: data duplication, inconsistencies between departments, and impossibility of having a complete and global view of a citizen, a company, or even a location. It is necessary to commit to interoperable solutions with APIs for integrations.

5. Flat data model without history or traceability

Only the current state of each record is saved, but then who was the previous holder? When did the activity change? Since when has this authorization been in effect? Impossible to know. When a complaint arrives, a report is requested, or simply someone asks how a record has evolved, there is no way to reconstruct its history.

A good register must save not only the present, but also the past. That traceability is what converts a simple list into a real management tool.

6. Converting the register into an information silo

The responsible area safeguards the register, but does not share it with other departments that could need that information: urban planning does not know what activities exist in an area, the competent units do not know what guarantees are in force, the councilor does not know what associations operate in the municipality, the Local Police do not have access to the terrace census...

A typical example: the Local Police are conducting field work and have to call Activities by phone to ask if it is authorized, how many tables it is allowed to have, and until what time it can operate. Or, as has always been done, the holder continues to be asked to provide that information. This data could be consulted in seconds if they had access to the register.

The solution is not to give indiscriminate access to anyone, but to establish differentiated roles: managers who can modify, consultation users who only view, administrators who configure the system... Each profile sees what they need and traces remain of all operations performed.

7. Keeping the register disconnected from the procedures that feed it

The register exists on one side and the administrative procedures and processes go on another. For example, licenses or grants are processed in the case management system, but someone has to remember to register it in the register or census. The same happens with deregistrations, which are known by chance, or modifications, which depend on the interested party communicating them and someone updating them manually.

The logical thing is for the register to be automatically fed by the procedures. Or, if that were not possible, that at least the data we collect in the procedures are what we later need for the register or census in question.

8. Managing blindly: without statistics or global view of information

How many licenses, contracts, grants, etc. do we manage? How many registrations and deregistrations this quarter? How are they distributed by areas, by types, by states? When a councilor asks, another Administration requests information from us, or a report needs to be prepared, the search for information and manual counting begins.

A well-managed register or census must offer real-time statistics: totals, temporal evolution, distribution by types and categories, comparisons between periods... The information will allow decisions to be made based on data, not intuitions.

9. Not controlling relevant deadlines, expirations, and alerts

Authorizations expire, periodic reviews pass their date, renewals are never carried out... No one finds out until it is too late or until the interested party submits a request or complaint.

Configuring automatic alerts for upcoming expirations, pending reviews, incomplete data, or anomalous situations allows acting proactively instead of always being reactive.

10. Not having an Audit Log

How long has this register or census not been updated? Who accessed the register yesterday? What operations did they perform? Who exported that list? In a public register or census, being able to answer these questions is not optional.

A complete Audit Log must record who accesses, what they consult, what they modify, and what they export. It is essential to comply with current regulations and to be able to investigate any incident.

👉🏻 Reycen: the solution for managing your municipal registers and censuses

If you have gotten this far recognizing several of these mistakes in your council, it is common, but they all have a solution.

Reycen is a platform specifically designed for the management of administrative registers and censuses in local entities. It has forms with validation, differentiated access roles, integration with other municipal systems, complete change history, real-time statistics, configurable alerts, and audit log, among other functionalities.

Want to see how it works? Request a no-obligation demonstration and we will show you how Reycen can help you better manage your municipal registers and censuses.

Write to us at administracion@reycen.com