Tracking council application deadlines without missing an RFI

A solo town planner gets a Request for Information from council on a Wednesday afternoon. Twenty-eight days to respond. They make a mental note. They get pulled into three other applications. The 28 days quietly tick down. Day 26, they remember. Day 28, they file in a panic. The response is rushed, the council pushes back, the application stalls another six weeks.

This pattern accounts for an embarrassing percentage of approval delays in small planning practices. It's not a knowledge problem. It's an attention problem. Here's the system that fixes it.

The core principle: deadlines live in the case, not your head

Solo practitioners try to keep deadlines in calendar apps. Calendar apps don't know that a single application generates 4-6 deadline windows over its life (lodgement, RFI window, decision date, appeal window, certificate compliance dates). They show isolated events instead of an applied-load picture.

Move deadlines to the case file itself. Every application has its own open-deadlines list. Closing the case clears the list. Multi-step reminders fire automatically without you typing anything.

The RFI clock: three reminders, not one

An RFI deadline reminder set at "day before" is useless. By then you don't have time to think; you only have time to react.

The pattern that works:

• Day +1 (after RFI received): case status changes to "RFI" and a draft response document is created.
• Day +7: first reminder — "Have you started the RFI response?"
• Day +14: second reminder — "14 days remaining. Send the draft for client review."
• Day +21: third reminder — "7 days remaining. Finalise."
• Day +25: escalation — "3 days remaining. Block the day."

Five touches catch you regardless of which day you happen to be paying attention. The deadline becomes impossible to miss without active avoidance.

Drawing version control: not Dropbox

The second biggest delay in council applications is drawing version confusion. Council reviews Rev B, requests changes, the architect sends Rev C to the planner, the planner sends Rev D (after a minor addition) to council — but council is still looking at Rev B because the email got buried.

Solve it by treating drawings as document slots with explicit revision labels. Rev D supersedes Rev C; only the current revision is shown by default; council always gets a link to "latest." Older revisions are kept for audit but not surfaced.

This is the kind of mundane fix that saves weeks across a year.

Bill the way you work: time-tracked on the case

Solo planners often discount their own time to keep clients happy, then under-bill when invoicing happens monthly because they can't remember what they did.

Run a stopwatch from inside the case file the moment you start working on an application. Stop it when you stop. Description gets logged automatically. End of month, every billable minute rolls into a draft invoice grouped by application. Two clicks to review, one click to send. The hours you discount become deliberate gestures, not embarrassed admissions.

Property data lives on the case

Address, lot/plan, zoning, council, application type, application number, parcel size, current land use, proposed land use. These are not free-text. These are fields you can filter and search by.

If you handle 30 active applications across 8 councils, you should be able to filter "show me all DAs lodged with City of Sydney where the RFI window closes this month." If you can't, you're navigating from memory and you'll miss something.

The pipeline view: where applications live by stage

One Kanban board per practice: Pre-application → Documentation → Lodged → RFI → Determination → Approved (or Appeal). Every active application is one card. The board is the work.

The board answers the question most useful to a solo planner each morning: "What's blocking me today?" Cards in the RFI column with deadlines approaching are urgent. Cards in Documentation that haven't moved in two weeks are stuck. The visual hierarchy makes the next action obvious.

The takeaway

Council application deadlines aren't a knowledge problem; they're an attention problem. Six tactical changes — case-level deadlines, multi- step RFI reminders, drawing revision tracking, time-tracked billing, structured property fields, and a pipeline board — remove the cognitive overhead that causes solo practitioners to miss windows.

How Caseflow handles this

The town planner pack ships with the full council application workflow, RFI multi-step reminder chains, drawing slot versioning, time tracking that rolls to invoice, structured property fields, and the Kanban pipeline view. Built for solo planners and small consultancies. Plays directly with Xero for end-of-month billing.