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Business licensing · public preview

Is that contractor licensed? Today the honest answer is: check the city, then check the state, then hope the two names match.

A business-tax certificate is the least glamorous record a city keeps and the one it most often keeps twice. Here the category catalogue is shared vocabulary rather than a dropdown baked into code, a sole proprietor and a corporation are handled by the same machinery, and the certificate a resident looks up is the row the clerk edited. 0 certificates are on file in the working record behind this page.
What the working system does
  • One identity, both sovereigns. A city business-tax certificate and a state professional licence hang on the same person or company — so one search answers the question a resident is actually asking.
  • The category catalogue is data. A city-style classification list lives as vocabulary the city edits, not as a hard-coded dropdown that needs a release to change.
  • Sole proprietors and companies, same machinery. The holder is whoever holds it; nothing breaks because a business is one person.
  • Renewals and delinquency as dated periods, so a lapsed certificate has a history rather than a flag somebody flipped.
  • A public lookup that reads the working rows — no export, no separate public database.

The console itself is behind a sign-in — and here is why, plainly

The clerk's console issues, renews and revokes certificates and edits the city's category catalogue — real write authority over a shared record. It is limited to the administrators of the city that owns it. The public lookup above needs nothing.
Sign in for the working record →✉ Ask for a walk-through
● Where this is early — said out loud
Demonstration records for a fictional city. Payment processing, mailed renewal notices and state-level filing integration are designed and not built.
Counts and pages on this site are generated from the working records at the moment you load them — this one at 2026-10-18 23:57 UTC.
And, second: where AI fits
Everything above is ordinary, traditional software doing ordinary government work: registers, permits, standings, dates, queues, public lookups. None of it needs AI, and none of it stops working when the AI is switched off. Where AI is offered it is optional, it is bring-your-own-key, and it never writes to a record without a person approving the change. For the record: no AI invented this data model — Alex Glaros did, at a drafting table, over years.