There’s plenty of conventional wisdom about firefighters’ love of tradition. After 50 years, NFIRS – the National Fire Incident Reporting System – is certainly one of those.
Since the 1970s, NFIRS has been the country’s centralized system for collecting fire-response data. Capturing around 75% of all U.S. fire department responses, it tallies more than 28 million incidents a year from an estimated 23,000 departments. It’s helped leaders develop valuable insight into areas like structure, wildland and vehicle fires; EMS calls, rescues and hazmat responses; casualties and property losses; and response times.
At the end of 2025, however, NFIRS is going away – giving way to a modernized, more powerful successor, the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS). Fire departments are spending this year transitioning. And while the process hasn’t been without its pain points, the enthusiasm of NERIS’ early adopters suggests the change is a needed and positive one.
“Our use of the prototype NERIS … has been a resounding success,” said John Butler, chief in Fairfax County, Virginia, and then-president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, after his department became a pilot user last year. “Being an early adopter of NERIS not only benefits our department but also contributes to advancing the use of the latest technology and analytics available to the fire service nationwide.”
“To have a repository of data that is able to be viewed at a local, regional and national level will help departments make decisions based on real-world situations, not just the latest, greatest internet video someone has seen,” added Dustin McDonald, battalion chief and head of EMS compliance for the fire department in Springdale, Arkansas.
For users in the field, though – the line personnel and company officers who often submit the data around incidents – the new system may bring challenges. NERIS comes with numerous additional data elements and increased complexity in nearly every module. How users interact with it – the processes and interfaces and efforts required – will matter a lot.
“Technically NERIS has a free interface people can go to directly and enter their calls. But it is the most awful, ugly and painstaking process imaginable,” said J. Edward Romeo, who manages fire products and services for Enforsys, a growing U.S. provider of software solutions for police and fire departments, including its signature Polisys CAD/RMS platform. “A lot of people don’t want to have to deal with it. So those organizations will need to make sure they have some other method in place come January 1, 2026.”
‘It’s all about that user experience’
For those departments, Enforsys has an answer with a strong supporting track record. Since 2005 it has offered a solution for the fire service that supports departments’ fulfillment of their NFIRS reporting requirements, now offered in a secure cloud-hosted environment. Now that software is evolving to support NERIS.
The new product, like the older one, is crafted to simplify and expedite the user experience of busy firefighters.
“It’s all about that user experience,” said Romeo, who’s worked with NFIRS reporting and fire inspection software in New Jersey for nearly two decades. “We want to save them time and make their lives easier. With any government website, it may be built by a bunch of folks who say, ‘OK, here are the fields we need. Throw them on a screen, and they’ll figure it out.’ We try to tie everything together, verify the data, make sure it’s all good. This way you can get done as quickly as you can and get back to what you’re doing.”
On the subject of that data, the new NERIS product can interface with Enforsys’ CAD/RMS solution, as well as those from other vendors, to save steps and boost accuracy by porting over call data and autofilling key details.
“The CAD data will feed in so it all matches,” Romeo added. “If the CAD has latitude and longitude data, that will be there as a physical address captured in the network system. It doesn’t have to be transcribed – 123 Main Street won’t wind up as 132 Main Street.”
That’s a time-saver too – important for smaller and volunteer departments, where personnel face pressures to get finished and on to the next task or home to work or sleep.
Keep your data
Enforsys’ fire suite, which also encompasses inspections, is customizable to organizations’ needs and specifications, with advanced querying and report-building capabilities that allow additional flexibility and insights. The company also offers planning, inventory, investigations, ticketing and EMS reporting products for fire clients.
“One of the big selling points of having a NERIS product is that we can provide lots of services and abilities beyond just what’s needed to report data federally,” Romeo added. That includes the ability to track drills and meetings, as well as tracking and reporting for length-of-service and benefit programs, all without the need for separate systems or paperwork.
An important aspect of this is the ability to maintain your own data. If you’re inputting it directly to the USFA, retaining it for your own purposes requires an extra step of duplicate entry. With Enforsys’ NERIS software, departments’ internal data can stay with them.
“On the police side in New Jersey, for example, there’s a state portal where police can input all that information for accidents,” noted Enforsys’ CEO, Gerard Britton. “The trouble with that, as it is here, is that if they go that way, then unless they double-enter their data, they don’t have any of that data in their own incident reporting system for their own use.”
There are many good reasons to want to keep that, and here’s the biggest one: The data that’s of most value to the USFA and its parent organization, FEMA, may not be the data that’s of most value to you locally.
“What departments need and what FEMA wants isn’t necessarily the same thing,” said Romeo. “There are things they need to track that FEMA couldn’t care less about. That’s our value-add: We offer custom reports you can build on the fly. We have a search engine to conduct custom searches through a wizard-like interface. You can combine things and track things like drills, meetings, things like that in a single application rather than different places.”
In the current environment of increased federal austerity, that can be important to justifying grant applications, as well as numerous other purposes.
Capture the complexity
The data demands of NERIS will far outstrip those of NFIRS. While the primary goal of the original system was to collect standardized data to support fire prevention, resource allocation and basic benchmarking, its broader successor is designed to capture the complexity and variety of modern responses and help power better analytics, decision support and operational outcomes. It uses a flexible, extendible model that permits more detailed and evolving capture of information.
Departments could choose to navigate that all on their own but will incur costs in time and manpower. Specialized software also comes with a cost – but can also carry substantial benefits.
“Something like 80% of the fire departments nationwide are volunteer,” noted Romeo. “These guys want to fill out their reports and get them done. They’re not tech guys. They don’t want to learn another interface. The more simple and comfortable the process is, the quicker they can finish and go on with their lives.
“We’re going to make sure users can hit the ground running and not have to relearn everything they’ve done for the last 15, 20 years. We will make this a comfortable transition for them.”
That will include potential tutorials and Q&A sessions for clients moving forward. For more information, visit Enforsys.
