What FOIAdesk does

An agency-branded submission page with structured fields, an immediate confirmation that carries the request number, and a plain-language statement of the requester's rights. A built-in “records we don't hold” box steers misdirected requests elsewhere before they become work.

Every open request on one screen, each row showing its statutory clock as a traffic-light state. The desk reads at a glance which requests are healthy, which are due soon, and which are overdue.

A per-agency intake address so a forwarded email lands in a triage queue for a person to promote into a tracked request. Queue items show when the request was effectively received, so nothing sits in a shared inbox quietly running a clock no one started. The intake address and triage queue are built; the email-receiving pipeline is being wired and needs a one-time DNS activation per agency domain before live mail flows in.

An optional per-agency page of records released on past requests. Duplicate and campaign requests can be pointed at the link — answer once, then point everyone else there.

Response, acknowledgment, extension, and appeal deadlines computed in business days with New York State holidays excluded. The clock is the spine of every request: it drives the dashboard's colors and the reminders.

The five-business-day acknowledgment and any extension's date-certain are tracked against the request, so an approximate-date promise is something the system holds the agency to — not a note in someone's calendar.

The deadline rules live in configuration rather than hard-coded logic, so corrections and new state rules are data changes. The clock math itself is fixture-tested against published guidance.

Route a request to the departments that hold the records. Each department gets a clear work order for its part while the overall statutory responsibility stays with the records-access officer at the desk.

Every request renders as a tree: the request at the root, each routed department a branch with its own status, uploads, and notes. Departments act on their own branch and can see siblings, so responses across departments stay coherent instead of contradicting each other.

A tenant setting can restrict sensitive branches so other departments see only metadata, not contents — useful when one department's working files shouldn't be open to the rest of the agency.

Reviewers work files with a per-file checklist and three dispositions — clear as-is, needs redaction, or withhold with an exemption citation. Decisions are recorded against the file, so review is documented and consistent rather than ad hoc.

Redact PDFs, images, and extracted email content inside the product. On save the released artifact is regenerated with the content actually removed — never a black box layered over still-readable text. The original is kept locked internally and paired with the redacted version underneath. Video is review-and-release only; frame-level video redaction is intentionally out of scope.

A mailbox export for the requested timeframe is exploded into individually reviewable items — each email a node, each attachment its own file — so an email-heavy request can be reviewed message by message instead of as one unreviewable archive. Per-item dispositions roll up to show review progress.

Cleared files are assembled into a release with a file manifest and an expiring download link. The rule that only cleared files can enter a release is enforced in the data layer, so a non-cleared file cannot be attached. Delivery events are recorded.

Internal previews and downloads of a not-yet-cleared file carry a watermark identifying the viewer, the time, and their address, alongside a per-view record — so a pre-release copy is always traceable to who opened it.

Each agency chooses its storage posture at onboarding: connect its own bucket, let the product hold originals only while a request is open and for a configurable window after, or keep everything under a retention add-on. A legal-hold flag freezes any automatic purge.

An add-on that indexes the files in a request so a reviewer can search a name, address, or phrase and catch every occurrence across files and attachments — keeping redactions consistent where eye-review alone would miss an instance.

Acknowledgments, extensions, grants, partial grants, denials, fee notices, and appeal determinations are generated from the request record. Each generated letter is stamped into the request's history.

A plain-English list of exemptions, each carrying its statutory citation and a supporting paragraph into the letter. The records officer selects and confirms; the product never picks an exemption on its own. Agencies can add their own local-law reasons, marked as agency-authored.

Appeals are tracked from intake through determination on their own clock, with the documentation an appeal needs assembled from the request's history — so the appeal stage is owned end to end rather than improvised.

Reminders fire as a deadline approaches and escalate if a request goes unattended, so an approaching due date reaches a person before it lapses rather than after.

The same events reach staff by email and by desktop notification today, so a reminder lands wherever the recipient actually works. SMS delivery is on the way.

Volume, response-time, and on-time-rate metrics summarized for the people who answer to a board — turning a year of request activity into figures that can be reported up.

Every action on a request is recorded as an immutable history, rendered as a timeline a non-specialist can follow — so what happened, when, and by whom is always answerable.

Distinct roles for the records officer, department responders, reviewers, appeals officers, and read-only supervisors — each role seeing the screen its job needs. The narrowest roles get a deliberately single-purpose view.

Email sign-in with multi-factor for smaller agencies, and the option to sign in through an agency's own Microsoft 365 identity for the staff who already have it.

Self-service administration of people, departments, policy settings, branding, and billing, so an agency manages its own configuration without a support ticket.

A native desktop client that does the same job against the same data — adding a tray, notifications, and watched folders for staff who'd rather not live in a browser tab. The app is built; we're finalizing packaging and updates.

An optional, per-tenant feature set where the only action that changes a record is high-confidence auto-routing, which is reversible. Everything else — classification, exemption and redaction suggestions, draft letters — is suggest-only; a person accepts or dismisses, and that decision is what's recorded.