Software Development for Cities & Towns
Software Development for Cities and Towns
Resident-facing services, staff tools, and integrations between the platforms a city already owns.
Most city software is bought, not built. The value of development work is in the gaps: the resident-facing service a permitting platform does not provide, the integration that stops staff from re-keying between finance and utility billing, the internal tool that replaced a spreadsheet nobody else understands.
What municipal environments look like
- Commercial platforms for permitting, licensing, utility billing, finance, asset management, and code enforcement
- A content management system running the city website, with varying levels of accessibility conformance
- Payment processing integrated separately into several systems
- GIS as the authoritative source for parcels and addresses
- Spreadsheets and shared inboxes carrying real processes that never got a system
Where HQT helps
- Resident-facing portals for applications, payments, scheduling, and status lookup, built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA and designed for a phone
- Integrations between city platforms through documented APIs, with monitoring so failures are noticed by staff rather than residents
- Replacement of spreadsheet and email processes with tracked, auditable applications, often on a low-code platform the city already licenses
- Accessibility remediation of existing sites, applications, and document libraries
- Modernization of applications a city built years ago and can no longer maintain
- Ongoing support with defined service levels, so a city is not left with software nobody can change
How an engagement usually starts
A department describes a process that takes too long, or a resident complaint highlights a service that does not work on a phone. We start with a discovery engagement, produce a scoped fixed-price proposal, and deliver in increments a department head can see working.