You might not need to buy anything for SIR 2027

A mandatory change with a January deadline is a good season to be selling fire department software. Some of what arrives in your inbox between now and then will imply that the 2027 Standard Incident Report requires a purchase.

It doesn't. It's worth being clear about that early, including by us.

What the requirement actually is

The obligation is to file. Every department reports every emergency incident it attends, quarterly, no later than the end of the month following the quarter. That is a Fire Marshal's directive, and it says nothing about software.

The OFM gives you two ways to do it:

Enter it on the OFM's website. The Standard Incident Report site takes incident and injury reports directly. The manual describes it as offering drop-down lists, lookup tables and built-in validation checks that align with the SIR data entry rules, and you can edit a submitted incident online later. It's the OFM's own system, provided as part of the reporting programme.

Send files. If your department has a system that holds incident data, it can export the OFM's text format and email it in. There's a formatting specification, and — importantly — the OFM tests your files before you're allowed to file that way for real.

Both are permitted routes under the 2027 requirements. A department typing reports into the OFM's site on January 2 is filing exactly as the OFM intends.

So what does change

The form. Sixty-three new fields, every response and property code renumbered, and a new section for carbon monoxide in structures. That work exists whichever route you use — it's just that on the OFM's site the new fields appear as new fields, and in your own system somebody has to put them there.

That's the honest division:

The question worth asking instead

Not "what do I have to buy?" — but "where does our quarter actually go wrong?"

For most departments the painful part of SIR filing has never been the form. It's the reconciliation: knowing that every call the department ran actually became a report, before the quarter closes. The OFM's site validates the record in front of you. It has no way to know about a call nobody typed in.

If your last quarter-end involved someone reconstructing a February incident in April from a memory and a dispatch printout, that's a real problem and it's worth solving. But it is a different problem from the 2027 change, and conflating them is how departments end up buying something in a hurry.

If someone does pitch you

Three questions that sort it out quickly:

1. "Has your 2027 export been tested with the OFM?" The manual requires files to be sent to the OFM for testing and confirmation before a department files by electronic transfer. "We're compliant" is not the same claim, and anyone can make it.
2. "What happens to my pre-2027 records?" Every response and property code was renumbered and some were deleted outright. A vendor who hasn't thought about the crosswalk hasn't read the pack.
3. "What do I do on January 2 if this isn't ready?" The correct answer is "file on the OFM's website" — and a vendor who won't say it is telling you something.

To be plain about our own position: FirePermit.Online does not sell incident reporting software today. We've been through the 2027 specification in detail because we're deciding whether to, and this series is what came out of the reading. If that changes we'll say so on the day it does.

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Sourced from the 2027 Standard Incident and Injury Reporting Manual and the 2027 SIR Electronic Data Transfer Technical Requirements (last updated 2025-11-13), supplied by the Office of the Fire Marshal. This is an unofficial summary and not OFM guidance. Confirm anything that affects your filing with OFMstatistics@ontario.ca.