SWRainAlertBuying guide
12 Questions to Ask Any SWPPP Software Vendor
You are the one who has to defend this system to an auditor. These are the questions worth asking before you sign anything — and the answers that should worry you.
Stormwater compliance software is bought on a demo and lived with through an audit. These twelve questions are the ones that surface the difference. Ask them of every vendor you are considering, including us.
About the data
1. Which rainfall data source do you use, and what happens when it disagrees with another?
“NOAA” is not an answer; NOAA publishes several products. Look for a specific named source, and ideally more than one. If a vendor runs two, ask what they do when the two disagree. Averaging is the wrong answer — it produces a figure neither source reported.
2. What do you show when there is no radar coverage for my site?
The answer you want is “we tell you we have no reading.” The answer that should end the conversation is “we show 0.00 inches.” A site the radar could not see is not a dry site, and a product that conflates them will eventually record a qualifying storm as a quiet day.
3. Is the threshold you use for my state verified against the current permit text?
Ask which permit version, and its effective and expiry dates. Permits get reissued; thresholds move. A vendor who cannot tell you which document their number came from is quoting somebody else’s summary.
About events and timing
4. Is accumulation measured on a rolling 24 hours or a calendar day?
It should be rolling. A calendar-day total splits an overnight storm in two and can miss a qualifying event entirely.
5. What happens on the second storm of the same day?
This one question reveals whether a vendor has modelled events at all. There should be a defined dry period that closes one event so the next starts from zero, with its own alert and its own deadline. Without it the second storm is silently absorbed into the first.
6. In which timezone is my inspection deadline calculated?
It must be the site’s local time. A Georgia site evaluated in UTC lands four to five hours off, which inside a 24-hour window can move the deadline to the wrong calendar day. Ask what happens if a site’s timezone cannot be determined — the right answer is that the site is refused, not defaulted to UTC.
About the record
7. Can a filed inspection be edited afterwards?
It should not be. Ask how corrections are handled; the defensible pattern is a new record referencing the original, leaving both visible.
8. Do drafts appear in exports?
They must not. An unfinished form inside an evidence pack reads as a claim that an inspection happened.
9. Where does the rainfall figure on the form come from, and is it labelled?
A prefilled number must carry its source. If software writes a figure onto your form and attributes it to a gauge it never read, that is fabrication with your signature underneath it.
10. Can I export a date range as a single document?
Records requests rarely want one report at a time. Ask to see the export, not a description of it.
About the operation
11. What happens when your ingestion fails?
Every data pipeline fails sometimes. The question is whether it fails loudly. Ask whether you are notified when the system has stopped receiving rainfall data for your sites — silence from a monitoring product is ambiguous in the most dangerous way.
12. What are you not good at?
The most useful question in the list. Every product has gaps. A vendor who claims none either has not run the product in anger or is not being straight with you. Our own answers: our photo analysis drafts a finding but never decides one — a person has to accept it, and it is not an inspection — and our Alabama threshold is labelled unverified because the permit is a scanned image and the response window is genuinely disputed.
One question that is not on this list: “can you guarantee compliance?” Nobody can, and a vendor who says yes has told you something important. These products are monitoring and recordkeeping aids. Where a permit names an on-site gauge as the system of record, the gauge is the record.
How to run the evaluation
- Ask for a trial on your sites, not a demo account with curated data.
- Add a site in a state you actually work in and check the threshold it derives.
- Wait for a real storm. How you find out about it is the product.
- File one inspection end to end, on site, and export it.
- Then read the export as if you were the regulator.
Common questions
What should I look for in SWPPP inspection software?
Named rainfall data sources with honest handling of missing data, permit thresholds verified against current permit text, rolling 24-hour accumulation with a dry-gap reset, deadlines computed in the site's local timezone, immutable filed records that exclude drafts from exports, and alerting when the data pipeline itself fails.
Is stormwater compliance software worth it for a small contractor?
It depends on how many sites you run and how exposed you are. The value is concentrated in two places: knowing a qualifying storm occurred without anyone watching the sky, and producing records you can hand over without reconstructing them. With one site and someone on it daily, a disciplined paper process can work. Across several sites it stops scaling quickly.
Can software guarantee stormwater compliance?
No. These products are monitoring and recordkeeping aids. They can tell you an inspection is required and help you document it properly, but compliance depends on the work being done on site and on the requirements of your specific permit.
A note on what this is. General guidance, not legal advice. Your permit, your SWPPP and your state’s requirements govern, and they differ. SWRainAlert is a monitoring and recordkeeping aid, not a compliance guarantee — where a permit names an on-site rain gauge as the system of record, the gauge is the record.