Boundary survey field notes app
A boundary is re-established from evidence: original marks found or not found, reference marks, occupations such as fences and walls, and how each agrees with the plan dimensions. Years later, the field notes are what another surveyor — or a court — reads to understand why the boundary went where it did. SurveyThanks keeps every mark search, every measurement against plan and every photo in one structured record that survives the crew’s notebook.
Built for licensed surveyors running teams of roughly 3–50 inspectors.
Sample Survey plan evidence
An illustrative excerpt. The site, readings and findings are fictional; the layout is yours to set.
Survey plan evidence
Field notes — Lot 12 on Fictional DP 1000
- Job
- Identification survey, 8 Example Close
- Survey date
- 17 March 2026
- Plans searched
- Fictional DP 1000, adjoining DP 2000
| Mark / occupation | Found as | Agreement |
|---|---|---|
| Drill hole in kerb (RM, NE corner) | Found, original | Agreement: Agrees |
| Peg at SE corner | Not found — area disturbed by driveway | Agreement: Not found |
| Paling fence, eastern side | 0.18 m east of title boundary | Agreement: Encroaches |
| Brick wall, southern side | On boundary within 0.02 m | Agreement: Agrees |
Fields captured on site
Your firm builds the form in-app, so these are a starting point rather than a fixed schema. Every field is captured on the device, with or without signal, and lands in the survey plan evidence where your template puts it.
Searches
- Plans and records searched
- Marks expected from the plan
Per mark
- Mark type (peg, drill hole, nail, reference mark)
- Found / not found / disturbed
- Original or replaced
- Photo with comment
- Location on map
Per occupation
- Type (fence, wall, building)
- Offset from title boundary
- Encroachment noted (yes / no)
Standards the report works to
- NSW RegulationSurveying and Spatial Information Regulation 2017 (NSW)
- Sets cadastral survey practice in NSW, including the marking and connection a boundary survey relies on.
- Vic RegulationsSurveying (Cadastral Surveys) Regulations 2015 (Vic)
- The Victorian equivalent for marks, connections and the evidence a cadastral survey records.
Load the standards you hold into your reference library and the drafted prose is written against them rather than against a general model.
How the survey plan evidence gets built
Capture it once, offline
Your firm builds the boundary survey field note form in-app — 25 field types, nesting repeatable groups, compound AND/OR visibility rules, reusable modules and calculated fields. Field capture works with no signal: jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio all queue in an idempotent outbox that only clears once the server confirms receipt.
Link it to your marks, stations and monitoring points
Enter marks, stations and monitoring points once, as a register. Every one of your observations, rounds and movement readings then points at a stored row rather than a name somebody typed — and the links survive a disconnected device.
Render your own template
The survey plan evidence renders into the Word template you already use — your letterhead, your section order, your clause library — with conditionals, loops over repeats, composable sub-templates and photo grids.
Reviewed before it leaves
You write the review framework: a checklist of what a survey plan evidence must contain, plus the prose standards you would mark a junior against. Link it to a report template and it runs every time that template renders. Each finding comes back graded info, minor or major, quoting the sentence at fault, and a person accepts or dismisses every one.
Because the structured submission behind the report is held too, the review is a comparison rather than a proofread: The movement summary reports 4 mm at PM3; the round’s readings put it at 11 mm.
Checks a surveying framework usually carries
- Control, datum and epoch are stated for every deliverable
- Quoted tolerances match the project specification being reported against
- Every mark named in the text exists in the register
- Assumptions and sources of error are recorded rather than assumed
Questions
- Can marks found on one job be reused on the next job nearby?
- Yes. Marks are entered once in a register and later jobs point at the same rows, so a reference mark found last year appears with its history when the crew returns to the street.
- Are photos tied to the mark they show?
- Yes. Photo-with-comment fields sit inside each mark’s group, so the image, the caption and the mark ID stay together in the record and in the report.
- Can a crew member dictate notes while holding the pole?
- Yes. Audio recording works offline; once back in coverage it is transcribed and suggested values are offered for individual fields, which the surveyor accepts or rejects.
What this is not
Worth knowing before you book a demo, so neither of us wastes the half hour.
- Not field-service dispatch. No timesheets, no parts, no inventory. Scheduling exists to get an inspector to a site.
- No signature capture. If your deliverable has to carry a signed sign-off on the artefact itself, this is not the tool yet.
- Field capture is what works offline — jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio. Reports, chat, scheduling and the inbox need a connection.
- No client portal. Reports go out as a file or a password-protected link.
Other surveying work we cover
- Construction set-out recordsSet-out verification report
- Contour and detail surveysDetail survey report
- Deformation monitoring roundsMovement monitoring report
- GPR survey recordsGPR survey report
- Laser scan site capturesPoint cloud delivery report
- Mine survey pickupsMine survey report
- Strata plan field verificationStrata plan report
- Utility locating recordsLocate mark-up report
Other disciplines
Rebuild your survey plan evidence in SurveyThanks
Bring the Word template you already send clients. If you are coming off another field-forms tool, a filled report can be uploaded, read field by field, and re-rendered into your template.