Surveying report software for field crews
A survey crew comes back with an instrument file, a page of field notes and a camera roll. The client never sees any of that: they see the as-built report, the movement summary, the locate mark-up or the volume statement, and that document is usually assembled by hand on a Friday from last month’s copy. SurveyThanks puts the field notes, the marks and the photos into one structured record on site, and renders the deliverable from it.
Surveying reports fall into three families. Evidence reports — boundary field notes, strata verification, utility locates — record what was found and how it was identified, and are read later by someone checking the reasoning. Comparison reports — as-built, set-out, deformation and settlement monitoring — measure something against a design or a baseline and live or die on stating the tolerance and the datum. Quantity reports — drone volumes, bathymetry, mine pickups — turn a surface into a number someone will invoice or reconcile against. The measurement itself stays in your survey software; the record of what was done, where and against which control is what lands in the report.
Enter your marks, stations and monitoring points once
Each reading points at a stored mark rather than a typed name, so a monitoring report can trend twelve rounds against the same point without anyone reconciling spelling between spreadsheets.
What goes in your reference library
- Surveyor-General directions for the jurisdictions you practise in
- ICSM guidelines and the relevant AS/NZS drafting standards
- Project-specific survey control and tolerance specifications
- Your own field note conventions and evidence-recording practice
- Client deliverable specifications and acceptance criteria
Reviewed before it leaves
Your own checklist and prose standards, run against the finished report — with findings graded info, minor or major, quoting the sentence at fault. Because the structured submission behind the report is held too, the review catches contradictions between the two: The movement summary reports 4 mm at PM3; the round’s readings put it at 11 mm.
13 report types in surveying
- Aerial mapping missionsMapping deliverable reportMapping firms
- As-built verification surveysAs-built reportContractors
- Bathymetric survey runsBathymetry reportPorts
- Boundary survey field notesSurvey plan evidenceLicensed surveyors
- Construction set-out recordsSet-out verification reportSurveyors
- Contour and detail surveysDetail survey reportArchitects
- Deformation monitoring roundsMovement monitoring reportGeotechs
- GPR survey recordsGPR survey reportLocating firms
- Laser scan site capturesPoint cloud delivery reportScanning firms
- Mine survey pickupsMine survey reportMine surveyors
- Strata plan field verificationStrata plan reportSurveyors
- Utility locating recordsLocate mark-up reportLocators
- Volumetric drone surveysVolume reportQuarries
Standards the report works to
- ICSM SP1Standard for the Australian Survey Control Network (Special Publication 1)
- How control is classified and connected — the basis for stating the class and order of the marks a deliverable relies on.
- GDA2020Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020
- The national horizontal datum most coordinate deliverables are now stated in, alongside the height datum used.
- AS 5488.1:2019Classification of subsurface utility information (SUI)
- The quality levels a locate or GPR report attaches to each utility it shows.
- CASA Part 101Civil Aviation Safety Regulations 1998 — Part 101, Unmanned aircraft and rockets
- The rules a drone mapping or volume flight is planned and logged under.
Load the standards you hold into your reference library and the drafted prose is written against them rather than against a general model.
Questions
- Does SurveyThanks process point clouds or reduce instrument data?
- No. Reduction, adjustment and CAD stay in the survey software you already use. SurveyThanks holds the field record around the measurement — marks, observations, photos, conditions, checks — and renders the client report from it.
- Can a monitoring point or control mark be shared across many jobs?
- Yes. Marks, stations and monitoring points are entered once as a register, and every reading on every round points at the stored row, so renaming a point updates every report that uses it.
- Do field crews need signal on a mine site or a remote corridor?
- No. Jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio are captured offline and held in a queue on the device until the server confirms receipt. Report generation runs once the crew is back in coverage.
- Can the report state the datum, control and tolerance automatically?
- Those are fields on the form, so the Word template places them in the report every time — and a review checklist can flag a deliverable that leaves them out.
Other disciplines
Bring your surveying template
Your letterhead, your section order, your clause library — with the drafted prose landing where the template says it should.