What is changing, what your vendor should already be doing about it, and what your department has to do regardless of vendor.
NFIRS is being retired and NERIS replaces it. This is not a reporting format change that your records vendor absorbs quietly on your behalf — it changes what data you are expected to hold, and it exposes how good your existing data actually is. Departments that treat it as a vendor problem tend to discover late that the vendor's migration assumes a data quality they do not have.
If you read one thing on this subject, read this.
The system itself: what NERIS is, how it is structured, and the timeline departments are working to.
Why it matters
NFIRS is being retired. Whatever your records vendor tells you about their roadmap, this is the actual specification they have to meet.
The public interface for filtering and exporting NERIS incident data.
Why it matters
Worth an hour before your next vendor conversation. Seeing what the national dataset actually contains changes what you ask for.
USFA's own guidance on the transition, including what departments need to do and by when.
Take these into the meeting. A vendor who answers them clearly is one worth continuing with.
What is above is the Hub’s framing and the best outside reading we could verify — useful on its own, and honest about being a starting point rather than the finished piece. If something here is wrong, or you know a better source, that is worth telling us before the long version is written.
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