Help
Questions and answers
How muniSERV works, in plain terms: signing in, consultant profiles and plans, posting for municipalities, billing. Each answer links to the page it is about.
24 questions.
Everyone
Sign in with the email address you registered with. If you have forgotten your password, use the Forgot password link on the sign-in page: we email you a reset link that works for one hour. Accounts registered on the old site keep their email address; use the reset link the first time.
Check your spam or junk folder first, and any filter your organization runs. The confirmation link lasts 24 hours. To get a fresh one, use the Resend link on the screen you saw after registering, or open your old link: an expired link offers to send a new one. If nothing arrives, contact us and we will confirm the address for you.
Email preferences let you choose the topics you hear about: platform announcements, RFPs, jobs, events, muniBLOG articles and municipal activity. Checked topics arrive together as one weekly round-up, on Tuesdays; a week with nothing new in your topics sends nothing. To change the address you sign in with, contact us and we will update it and send a confirmation to the new address.
A basic listing never shows contact details — it is your name, company, city, provinces and service areas, and nothing else. On a full profile the email address and phone number are shown to anyone who is signed in (municipal staff, members and consultants on a paid plan) except consultants on the free plan; visitors who are not signed in are asked to sign in first. Municipal staff choose on their own profile whether their contact details appear publicly.
Two places. Municipal staff post RFPs directly on muniSERV, and an admin reviews each one before it appears. The rest are mirrored from Bids & Tenders, and we check for new and changed tenders every five minutes; province and category tags are refreshed every hour. Every RFP is open to everyone, and every one carries the full description. The documents themselves usually stay with the municipality or the tendering service — where a tender names a link, it is on the page. Signed-in members can ask the municipality a question from the tender page, and we pass it on.
Use the contact form and describe what you were doing and what you saw. For an urgent technical issue put URGENT in the subject line. Screenshots help.
Open My Subscription and scroll to the Account section at the bottom. Closing stops sign-in, removes your profile from the directory and stops all email; what you posted stays on the site, and the account can be reopened by contacting us. If you pay for a plan, you choose when it closes: at the end of the period you have paid for, with everything working until then, or the same day, giving up the rest of the period without a refund. Closing does not refund any account credit you hold with us; ask us first if you want it back.
Consultants
Register as a consultant, or if you already have a member account, choose Become a consultant on your dashboard. You start with a basic directory listing — your name, company, city, provinces and service areas — and you can switch it off at any time. Pick Essential or Professional when you want your full profile in front of municipalities and want them to be able to reach you.
Free puts a basic listing in the consultant directory: your name, your company, your city, the provinces you serve and your service areas, so municipalities can find you by those. Essential adds the rest of your profile — bio, photo, company logo, website and contact details — on its own page municipalities can open and link to. Today Professional includes everything in Essential, plus: featured placement in search; submit up to 2 muniBLOG articles a month; a count of your profile views; success stories & testimonials; video introduction; post events to the events calendar. The profile view count is a number only: nothing about who viewed your profile is recorded. The weekly email of RFPs matched to your practice is not running yet. It is coming soon, and we will tell Professional subscribers when it starts.
Exactly five things: your name, your company, your city, the provinces you serve and your service areas. Nothing else is public — no bio, no photo, no company logo, no website, no email or phone, no testimonials or success stories — and a basic listing has no profile page, so there is nothing for anyone to open or link to. Municipalities can find you by province or service area and see that you exist; if one wants to reach you, they contact muniSERV. You control it with the profile switch on your dashboard: switch it off and you are not in the directory at all.
A listing needs the profile switch on, an active account and a name on the profile. A free account is listed too, as a basic listing, and because that card shows only your company, city, provinces and service areas, a free listing also needs a company name and at least one service area or province. The status line under Welcome on your dashboard tells you if something is missing.
On your dashboard, the status line under Welcome has a Switch on or Switch off button. Switching off hides the profile from the directory without changing your plan; switch it back on any time. Buying a plan switches the profile on for you.
On Edit Consultant Profile, use the Profile photo and Company logo cards. JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF up to 5 MB; photos are cropped to a 400 by 400 square and logos fitted inside 600 by 300, so a PNG with a transparent background works best for logos. iPhone photos are converted from HEIC automatically when you pick them from Photos; from other devices, export a HEIC file as JPEG first. Every image gets an automatic check, and anything the check cannot call a headshot or a logo is looked at by an admin.
Both live on Edit Consultant Profile, below the profile fields. They are part of the Professional plan: on Essential or Free the section is locked, and you can add them once you move to Professional.
Consultants on the Professional plan can submit up to two articles a month; municipal staff can submit one. Write it from My Articles on your dashboard. An admin reviews every article before it is published, usually within 24 to 48 hours.
Consultants on the Professional plan and municipal staff can submit events: workshops, webinars, conferences and public meetings. Events are reviewed before they appear on the calendar.
Municipalities
A municipal account is free. RFPs: choose Post an RFP on your dashboard; an admin reviews it before it is published. Jobs: muniJOBS postings are bought as credits; one credit buys one posting, which an admin approves before it goes live and which then stays up until its closing date, for up to 90 days, Featured above the main listings for that whole run. The credit is refunded if the posting is not approved; once approved, it stays used when the posting expires or is taken down early. Credits belong to the account that bought them, not to the municipality: a colleague cannot spend them, and when that account is closed they stay with it, unusable unless it is reopened. Buy them on the account that will do the posting; if someone is leaving, contact us before their account closes and we can move their unused credits to a colleague. Credits can be bought once your affiliation is approved. Events: submit them from your dashboard and they appear after review. Posting needs your municipality affiliation to be approved.
Your account works, but your link to the municipality has not been confirmed by an admin yet. Posting RFPs, jobs and events, importing and editing the municipality profile open up once it is confirmed. An email address on the municipality's own domain speeds this up; otherwise contact us with your title.
Open My Team on your dashboard and enter their name, title and email. The invitation lasts 14 days and lands them on your municipality without a second approval. You can invite once your own affiliation is approved. Consultants can invite colleagues at their company the same way once a company name is on the profile.
Members
Browse the consultant directory, RFPs, the events calendar and muniBLOG, save jobs you are interested in, and choose the email digests you want. Members do not publish articles. If you want a profile municipalities can find, choose Become a consultant on your dashboard.
Billing
On My Subscription, Change plan or billing switches between Essential and Professional and between monthly and annual. Before anything is charged you see the amount. A change that costs more per month takes effect immediately, and the prorated difference, plus HST, is charged that day (any account credit is used first). A change that costs less per month (a lower plan, or yearly billing of the same plan) and a switch from yearly to monthly billing take effect at the end of the period you have paid for, and nothing is charged until then. While a payment is overdue, pay it before upgrading. Cancel subscription stops the renewal: you keep your plan until the paid period ends, and you can resume before then. Card details are updated through the billing portal on the same page.
Yes: prices on the site are shown before tax, and 13% HST is added at checkout. Every payment sends a receipt to your account email, with its number, the date, what was bought, the subtotal, the HST line, the total, our legal name and our GST/HST number, and a link to the payment receipt. A refund sends a credit note, or a refund receipt naming the invoice it corrects. Every receipt and credit note is listed under Billing history on My Subscription, where you can have any of them sent to you again.
Credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express and the other networks Stripe accepts), including through Apple Pay or Google Pay, processed by Stripe; muniSERV never sees your card number. There is no free trial and paid subscriptions are not refundable once paid; the Free plan lets you try muniSERV for as long as you like. Annual billing is the standard term and costs less than monthly.
Our charges appear on card statements as WWW.MUNISERV.CA. Look for a muniSERV receipt of the same amount and date in your email, or under Billing history on My Subscription. If you still do not recognise it, email [email protected] with the date and the amount before you dispute it with your bank: we will look into it and refund any charge made in error, which is much faster than a bank dispute. Please write within 30 days of the charge.
Still stuck? Contact us with what you were doing and what you saw. We reply by email.