Every feature

Everything Dekree does. And what it doesn't.

If you are comparing vendors, this is the page to print. Every feature below is in the product today, not on a roadmap. The list of what we have not built is at the bottom, and it is honest.

Included with every plan

The document vault, user accounts, and the workflow itself are never sold separately and never priced per seat.

Unlimited users

Deputy clerk, treasurer, attorney, board members. No per-seat charge, ever.

Document vault

Every record in one place, with folders, drag-and-drop, and full-text search.

Full-text search

Across PDFs, Word files, and meeting transcripts. Search inside the document, not just its title.

Automatic OCR

Scanned PDFs are read so they become searchable like everything else.

Server-side redaction

The text is removed from the file itself. The original is preserved in restricted storage.

Append-only audit trail

Every action timestamped, attributed, and exportable.

Upload from your phone

Scan a document with your phone and it lands in the vault.

Roles and permissions

Clerks draft, supervisors approve, council views.

Multiple public bodies

Board, Planning Commission, ZBA, DDA. Each with its own meetings, records, and coordinator.

Multi-organization accounts

One login for a clerk who also serves a joint authority.

FOIA

Public-records requests, from the moment one lands to the day it closes.

Email intake

Forward your inbox once. Requests are classified and logged automatically.

Request form on your website

Residents file without emailing you, and the clock starts itself.

Statutory deadline engine

Five business days, holiday-aware, computed from your organization’s calendar day.

Deadline radar

Escalating alerts before a request goes red, not after.

Extensions

The 10-day extension, with the statutory citation and the notice.

Put the clock on hold

Waiting on a clarification or a deposit tolls the deadline, and it auto-resumes.

Duplicate request detection

A banner when a new request looks like one you already have. One tap links them.

Anonymous requests

Optional, off by default. Lawful in Michigan.

Response drafting

Drafted from your records with the exemption cited. Nothing sends without your approval.

Exemption library

Every exemption under MCL 15.243(1)(a) through (cc), cited inline.

Denial and appeal letters

With the statutory basis and the appeal instructions the law requires.

PII auto-detection

SSNs, card numbers, and bank routing numbers found with real validators, each with its exemption attached.

Fee calculator

Labor increments, fringe cap, the 6x minimum-wage contractor ceiling, and the 10-cent copy cap.

Deposits and waivers

The 50 percent deposit under MCL 15.234(8), public-interest waivers, indigence and nonprofit handling.

Fee itemization PDF

The breakdown a requester can check line by line.

Per-record release gate

Working copies stay internal. You choose exactly what gets released.

Auto-release on payment

Optional. When the balance is paid, held records are released automatically.

Requester status page

They track it themselves instead of calling you.

Intake deflection

Residents are shown records you already published before they file.

Access logging

Who viewed what, and when.

Internal notes and mentions

Talk to your colleague on the record without talking to the requester.

Open Meetings

Notice, agenda, the meeting itself, minutes, and the recording.

Bring your own agenda

Upload your Word or PDF agenda and it publishes verbatim. Never reformatted.

Bring your own notice

Same for notices. Upload, review, post.

Agenda builder

Sections, consent agenda, drag-and-drop, and your own numbering convention.

Agenda templates

Per public body, and copy-from-last-meeting.

The 18-hour notice rule

Applied to special and rescheduled meetings only, not to regular meetings on your posted schedule.

Annual meeting schedule

Generated and posted, per MCL 15.265(2).

Agenda packets

Contents page, per-item dividers, page stamps, and a clickable PDF outline.

Any file type in the packet

Word, Excel, images, and scans are converted in. Nothing is silently dropped.

Live meeting console

Run the meeting from it. Roll call, motions, votes, and dispositions as they happen.

Quorum indicator

Computed live from the roster. Late arrivals count once they arrive.

Speaker timer

Two, three, or five minutes. Amber at thirty seconds, red when they run over.

Roll-call votes

Mover, seconder, result, and each member’s vote. Names surface on a split vote.

Motion types

Amendments and substitutes sit under the motion they act on.

Walk-on items

Items raised from the floor, without breaking the agenda.

Minutes drafted from the recording

Grounded in your roster, your packet, and your confirmed attendance. It does not invent names.

Per-board minutes style

Your Planning Commission can read differently from your Board.

Minutes editor

Full-screen, autosaving, with version history and one-click restore.

Electronic signature

Clerk and presiding officer sign the minutes inside Dekree.

Follow-ups view

Everything tabled, postponed, or carried over, across every meeting.

Notify the board

One click emails every member the packet. Anyone unreachable is named back to you.

Board member access

Members log in and see the meetings and packets for the bodies they sit on.

OMA compliance scoring

A running read on where each body stands.

Meeting recordings

Included with Open Meetings. There is no separate line item and no per-hour indexing charge.

Video or audio

An audio-only recording gets the identical player, chapters, and search. No camera required.

Automatic chapters

Built from your agenda and the transcript. No human indexer.

YouTube channel sync

Connect once. New recordings are matched, transcribed, and chaptered with no clicks.

Searchable transcript

Search a name or a topic and land on the exact moment.

Search across meetings

Years of recordings, one search.

Chapter editor

Rename, retime, add, or delete a chapter. The index is yours.

Private bookmarks

Drop a marker while you write the minutes. Residents never see them.

Review before publish

Chapters land as a draft. You decide what the public sees.

Bring your own hosting

Your video stays on your own channel, where hosting is free.

Public records on your website

Everything below can be embedded into the site you already have, or run as its own site at your own domain.

Embeddable widgets

Document library, meeting calendar, meeting player, FOIA form, and status lookup. Two lines of HTML.

Your colors, not ours

The widgets inherit your brand and carry no vendor chrome.

Self-sizing

The widget tells your page how tall to be. No fixed heights, no inner scrollbars.

Hosted portal

If you would rather not embed, you get a standalone site at your own domain.

Document library

Nested folders, search inside document contents, and in-place PDF preview.

Folder visibility

Hiding a folder takes everything in it offline. One switch, no surprises.

Meeting calendar

With .ics subscription, so residents get meetings on their own calendar.

Works on a phone

Built for a 390px screen, with the device’s native PDF viewer.

Accessibility

Screen-reader landmarks and AA text contrast throughout.

Records & Retention

Every rule comes from the official DTMB General Retention Schedules, quoted as printed.

2,149 record series

From all 31 current DTMB schedules for local government.

Traceable to the source

Every rule carries a trail back to the page of the signed state schedule it came from.

Searchable schedule picker

Grouped by official schedule and filtered to your entity type.

Applied on upload

The right schedule attaches when the document lands.

Disposition tracking

What is eligible, what is due, and what is overdue.

Missing-retention filter

Shows exactly which records have no schedule yet, and how many.

Legal hold

Survives until you lift it.

Weekly schedule watch

The state revises these. When it does, we re-pull from the source.

Disposal log

Date, record, schedule, and approver. The defense, not the attestation.

Reports & Analytics

The numbers you are asked for, without assembling them by hand.

Annual FOIA summary

Volume, grant and denial rates, response times, and fees. Board-ready.

PDF and CSV export

Both generated from the same source of truth.

Per-body breakdown

See where the work actually lands.

Response-time analytics

Spot the requests trending toward the deadline before they miss it.

Compliance scorecards

A running read on FOIA and Open Meetings health.

Payments

Free. There is no platform fee. The resident pays the processor fee, and funds settle to your bank.

Card and bank transfer

Residents pay online instead of mailing a check.

Statutory deposits

The 50 percent deposit, collected only after a fee is formally sent.

Money never touches Dekree

Funds settle straight to your own connected account. We never hold public funds.

Refunds

From your own dashboard.

Append-only ledger

Purpose, amount, and timestamp against the request.

What Dekree does not do

You will find this out eventually, so you should find it out from us. Some of these are things we chose not to build, not things we have not gotten to.

Live video streaming

Deliberate. Stream free on YouTube and Dekree does the rest. We are not going to charge you for bandwidth you can get for nothing.

Redacting video and audio

Not built. It is specialist work and we would rather say so than sell you a weak version of it.

Litigation hold and discovery

Not built. If you need a legal suite, you need an enterprise records platform, not us.

Member voting devices

Not built. The clerk captures the vote, which is the right shape at our customers’ size.

Requester logins

Deliberate. Requesters track a request with a reference number and their email. No account to create.

Staff agenda-item submission

Not built yet. Items are entered by the clerk. This is on the roadmap for organizations with departments.

Want to see any of this on your own records?

Book a 15-minute walkthrough