From five hours of manual work to twenty minutes of review per permit file

The starting point

In Belgium, anyone who performs with children under fifteen has to request an exemption from the competent government service for every production. Per production that means: filling in a form, preparing a sheet per child, collecting signed parental declarations, chasing missing signatures and filing the bundle at least a month in advance. Without a permit, a child cannot go on stage.

At this organization the work sat with one external staff member, who dropped out. From then on it sat with nobody. A single file easily took half a working day, and everything that needed monitoring (deadlines, the number of performances per child per year, rest periods) lived in someone’s head.

What we built

A web application, the concert portal, where the organization creates a production, ticks the participants or imports them from Excel, and gets the complete file out of it:

• the completed application form and a sheet per child, with the file names the government service asks for;
• parental declarations signed digitally, with automatic reminders and an overview of what has come in;
• school certificates for all participants, including those over fifteen, which can go out straight away;
• monitoring of annual limits, rest periods and the filing deadline, with a warning before anything goes wrong;
• a review screen and a log: nothing goes to the government without a person checking it first.

The idea behind it

The process is the same every time, only the data changes. That is why the system deliberately runs without AI. We used AI to build it quickly and thoroughly, not to let it make decisions. The result is predictable, auditable and cheap to maintain.

We separated two document flows that used to get mixed up in practice: the legal file, which waits for completeness and approval, and the school certificate, which is not a legal requirement and goes out immediately. That one decision removed most of the waiting time from the process.

After delivery the system kept growing with what the organization ran into, such as a multi-day study trip without child labour, or a certificate that had to be reissued after a change in hours. Always from the source data, never by editing documents by hand.

Expected results

Compiling a file goes from roughly five hours of manual work to roughly twenty minutes of review. That is an estimate based on the old process. The system has been live since September 2026 and was used for the first productions, with the first parental signatures coming in on the evening it went live.

Expected impact

The biggest gain is not in the hours but in certainty. A missed file directly affects a performance, and penalties for child labour are in the most serious category. The system makes the organization independent of one person, and whoever takes over sees at a glance what still needs to happen.