For Iowa municipal clerks

Open Records Law compliance without the enterprise price tag.

One place to intake, track, redact, and release records — with Iowa's response rules, exemption codes, and holiday calendar already set up. Published pricing from $99 per month on a department purchasing card — no annual contract required.

Start your free 30-day trial

Free for 30 days · no credit card · most city email addresses start the same day; the rest are reviewed within one business day

What you get on day one

Instant Privacy Scan Run the scan on a document and it looks for the patterns that cause problems — Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, addresses, driver's license numbers, medical codes — and those spots come back as draft redactions for you to approve. Redaction is included in every plan, not sold as a separate module.

Built for the Open Records Law Iowa sets no fixed number of days, and the software knows it. Request activity is recorded in the audit log, reports show how long requests actually took, and there is no invented countdown clock pretending state law says something it does not.

A portal for requesters Every request gets its own status page the requester can check any time, which cuts down on the "just checking in" phone calls. Released records go to a public reading room, so the next person asking the same question can find the answer without filing anything.

Find & Fix Everywhere Redact a name, an address, or any pattern once and clear it from every page of the document at the same time. Scanned paper records are read first so the text is searchable, which matters when a request lands on a box of filings from 1997.

The Iowa parts are already configured

Pick Iowa during setup and the state's settings load with it — there is nothing for you to look up and enter.

What Iowa works under	What is already set up
The statute	Deadline settings, terminology, and exemption codes are configured for the Iowa Open Records Law (Iowa Code Ch. 22).
The response window	Iowa requests read "No deadline set by state law." No countdown, no overdue badge, no automatic reminder emails claiming a deadline that does not exist. If your office keeps an internal target, it is labeled as your goal, never as state law.
Exemption citations on refusals	Iowa's exemption codes are loaded. Tag the code on the redaction and the citation carries into the response letter.
The holiday calendar	Iowa's state holiday calendar is loaded for reference and for any internal target dates your office sets.

Your agency reviews every setting during the guided setup and can adjust it to local practice. This page describes how the software is configured; it is not legal advice.

You can buy it without a council vote

The price is on the page No demo wall, no discovery call, no custom quote. Four tiers — District $99, Town $199, City $299, and Metro $499 per month — and you can start the trial without talking to anyone. See the full plan comparison →

Every tier stays under $500 a month That keeps it inside normal department purchasing card limits — no RFP, no procurement cycle, no agenda item. Cancel any time; no annual contract required.

Redaction is not an add-on The legacy platforms sell automatic redaction as a paid module on top of a five-figure contract. The full privacy scanning suite is in every plan starting at $99 per month.

Nothing to install No server, no IT project, no implementation fee. You sign up and configure it yourself in an afternoon — that is the whole implementation.

For your IT director and city attorney

CivicRecordsOnline hosts agency workspaces on Microsoft Azure in US regions and uses HTTPS for data in transit. Role-based access limits staff capabilities, and request activity is recorded in the audit log. Redaction suggestions use rules and pattern matching rather than a generative AI model, so the same document produces the same suggestions each time; they are drafts that require staff review before anything is published. Agency records are not sent to train outside AI models. See the full IT and security overview →

See the price. Start the trial. Skip the sales call.

Start your free 30-day trial

Free for 30 days · no credit card · plans start at $99 per month

Questions from a Iowa office? Email hello@civicrecordsonline.com.