Inspected.com is revolutionizing the building permit and inspection process across Florida and Texas by enabling remote video inspections that can be scheduled same-day, eliminating weeks or months of waiting time typically required when working directly with municipalities.
As their Business Analyst Specialist, Jon has implemented Zing Data as the company’s primary analytics platform, moving away from Google Looker to gain more intuitive data access and management capabilities.
The company uses Zing to track inspection statuses, monitor permit workflows, and analyze geographic patterns in their business. Their internal teams - from administrators to field technicians - rely on Zing’s dashboards to forecast upcoming workload, identify high-activity regions for resource allocation, and make strategic decisions about where to expand support.
Zing Data’s responsive development team and ability to quickly implement feature requests has made it feel like Inspected has their own dedicated dev team, with improvements like data table pagination options, question categorization, and enhanced filtering capabilities delivered rapidly based on their feedback.
Zack (Zing Data): Hey, Jonathan, I was wondering if you could walk me through what Inspected does and what your role is there.
Jon (Inspected): Inspected is a company that helps expedite the process of getting a permit for building. Right now we’re in Florida and Texas and we work with the municipalities in those two states to help with inspections - site inspections for building and different repairs. Typically you would have to go to the municipality themselves to get this done, but we provide a service that allows you to do that remotely through a video call and get your inspections done that way. Then we help you with the whole process of getting your permits taken care of.
Zack: So it makes it a lot easier to get projects done, it sounds like.
Jon: Faster, easier. You can get an appointment same day if you want, instead of waiting weeks or months for the municipality to look through.
Zack: And what’s your role there?
Jon: I’m a Business Analyst Specialist, working with reporting and data work, working with the database itself.
Zack: Before you started using Zing, how were you managing data, running analysis and so on?
Jon: We started off in Google Looker, trying to use that as our platform for data manipulation and presentation.
Zack: What led you to look for solutions beyond Looker?
Jon: My boss was having a hard time managing what was going on with Looker. While that platform does have its strengths, there were some challenges that we were having a hard time getting through. I did some searching and actually found Zing through a Reddit post where somebody had recommended it. I looked into Zing and a few different other platforms, and there was something about Zing that stood out to us. So we pulled the trigger on it and started working on some demos.
Zack: Can you talk a little bit about what onboarding was like and how you use it today?
Jon: Super simple. I love the interface. When you first get in there, once you’ve created your account, you can connect to a bunch of different data sources. We only needed the one using Postgres, but it was really easy and intuitive. Data connections can either be simple in that they ask you all the right questions, or you have to create some kind of string that becomes a nightmare at some point. Thankfully, Zing was one of those easier to implement connections to our data.
Zack: I know over time you guys have had a couple good feature ideas - I think categorizing questions into different topics to make it easier to find, among other requests. Can you talk a little bit about when you’ve had ideas or bumped against issues, what it’s been like working with the Zing team?
Jon: In a way I feel like I’ve been torturing you guys, coming at you with constant requests and updates! What’s amazing is it feels like I’m almost working with my own dev team. You guys are incredibly responsive. While I don’t have a connection to your JIRA workload or anything, I feel like I’m pretty close to it - I feel like my name is in there somewhere!
We’ve made all kinds of requests - paging on the grid view data, different functionality in the filtering, and some fine-tuned smaller features that may have a larger impact in the back end. No matter whether it was a tiny one-day turnaround thing or if it was an effort that you needed to work out in the background, you guys were super responsive and quick to actually delivering on these things. It’s been a pleasure working with this company.
Zack: How is the set of questions and dashboards used today by you and other folks on the Inspected team?
Jon: A lot of our data has to do with the actual inspections that we do, with the status of permits and where they’re going. It’s being used mostly by internal people - admins in the company. We’re using it internally for the admins and for people who are working with the data directly, people who are doing inspections, technicians that are helping out on site.
They all can use these reports and the data we’re pulling through to know what’s coming up. They can get an idea of what sort of workload is coming up in the future and plan ahead for it. They can see what parts of the state of Florida are producing the most work and where they might want to push for more activity or maybe where they want to increase support. That’s pretty much where and how we’re using the data.
Zack: Thanks so much for taking the time, Jon. It’s cool to see how much you guys have built out and how quickly, and we love all the great feature ideas that you’ve nudged us to build out!
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