A crew is in a driveway. The job is sold, the equipment is on the truck, and the permit is not approved. Everybody involved is competent and everybody is stuck.
The application itself was not hard. It took about fifteen minutes. It was started on Monday for a job scheduled Tuesday.
Where the time actually lives
Filing takes minutes. Review takes days, and how many days is a property of the jurisdiction, not of your paperwork. Some approve mechanical permits same day online. Some take a week. Some take a week except in the spring.
A company working across four municipalities is running four different clocks, each with its own forms, fees and definitions of what scope even needs a permit. None of that is written down anywhere in the business.
The fix is a trigger, not a reminder
Reminders fail because they compete with everything else on a Monday. The thing that works is tying the filing to the moment the job is sold rather than to the moment it is scheduled, so the review clock starts as early as it possibly can.
That single change absorbs almost all of the variance. A jurisdiction that takes five days is not a problem if you filed eleven days out. It is only a problem if you filed yesterday.
What to look at
Pull every job in the last quarter that got rescheduled. Mark the ones where the reason was a permit or an inspection. Then look at the gap between the sold date and the filing date on each.
The number you want is not how long the city took. It is how long you waited before asking.