building permit
Your building permits
become rows in a Google Sheet.
Upload or forward a building permit by email and its extracted data is added as a new row to a Google Sheet, within seconds. Drop one below and we will determine the column names and create the sheet.
Drop a building permit here
PDF, photo, scan, Word or PowerPoint — up to 50 pages
No account. No card. Your first sheet is free.
What your sheet will look like
| A | B | C | D | E | F | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Permit number | Jurisdiction | Project address | Permit type | Issue date | Expiration date |
| 2 | BLD-2026-04412 | City of Denver | 77 Colfax Ave | Tenant improvement | 07/14/2026 | 07/14/2027 |
| 3 | ELEC-2026-0918 | City of Denver | 77 Colfax Ave | Electrical | 07/16/2026 | 01/16/2027 |
| 4 | B26-114402 | City of Chicago | 1420 Halsted St | Renovation | 07/18/2026 | 07/18/2027 |
| 5 | MECH-26-0044 | City of Austin | 905 E 6th St | Mechanical | 07/22/2026 | 01/22/2027 |
Four building permits, four rows. Yours starts at row 2.
The columns
These are the columns we usually find on a building permit. You can rename them, drop the ones you do not track, and add your own before the sheet is created. Anything you add to the right of our columns stays untouched — including formulas.
- Permit numberstring
- Jurisdictionstring
- Project addressstring
- Permit typestring
- Issue datedate
- Expiration datedate
- Valuationnumber
- Statusstring
Questions people ask
- Permits expire while the job is still running.
- That is what the expiration column is for. Sorted ascending it is the list of permits to extend, and an expired permit found by an inspector costs more than one found in a spreadsheet.
- Every jurisdiction issues a different-looking permit.
- None of them need configuring. Whatever the city's form looks like, the columns in your sheet stay the same — which is what makes a multi-jurisdiction portfolio trackable at all.
- I work in Excel. Can I get the data out of Google Sheets?
- Yes, and it is Google's feature rather than ours: Google Sheets will download any sheet as .xlsx or .csv from its own File menu, and it opens in Excel from there. What we build and keep filling is the Google Sheet itself — we never produce an Excel file, so anything forwarded later adds a row to the sheet and not to a copy you have already taken off it.
- What if one scan holds several building permits?
- Each one becomes its own row. We tell you how many we found before the sheet is created, and you can correct it in one click if we got it wrong.
- Do photos from a phone work?
- Usually, yes — including stamped, stapled and hand-annotated copies. If a photo of a building permit is too blurry to read we say so rather than inventing a row.
- Who can see my Google Sheet?
- Only people you give the link to. The link is unguessable, anyone holding it can edit the sheet, and we never share it with anyone else.
- Do you keep my building permits?
- No. We keep the extracted row, not the document. The file is discarded once your sheet is built.
- How does forwarding work?
- Your sheet gets its own address at in.tosheet.ai. Forward a document there — from your own mailbox, or straight from whoever sends them to you — and ToSheet.ai adds its row within seconds. You never have to open this site again.