If you're still logging grade shots on a paper field book or a printed shot sheet, you're one rain shower away from a dispute you can't win. Digital logs aren't just more convenient — they're your legal and professional protection.
Rain, mud, standing water. A field book survives about three wet days before it's illegible. Grade readings in smeared ink aren't documentation — they're guesses.
A handwritten shot sheet with corrections, cross-outs, and smears does not project professionalism. Inspectors have seen too many "adjusted" paper logs to take them at face value.
Paper gets left on a dash, blown out of a truck, buried under other jobs, or thrown out during a cleanout. If you need to reference a job from six months ago, paper is a coin flip.
The engineer wants to see grade shots while you're still in the trench. You can't fax a field book. You can't share a photo of a wet shot sheet and expect it to hold up.
Which job had that 6-inch run? What was the invert at MH-14 on that subdivision from last year? Paper logs require physical retrieval. Digital logs are searchable in seconds.
On paper, you write the design and the actual. Somebody has to manually subtract to get the deviation — and if that math is wrong, you might not know until the inspector finds it.
You installed 800 feet of 8-inch sewer last month. The city engineer says there's a low spot at Station 11+50. Your paper logs are in a banker's box in the shop and you're pretty sure someone spilled coffee on them. Without verifiable documentation, you're back in the ground.
With Sitemark: Pull up the job, share the shot log with deviation data, show the elevation profile. The conversation ends in five minutes.
You logged grade shots on a Thursday. Heavy rain Friday and Monday. When you come back on Tuesday, your shot sheets have turned into papier-mâché. You have to go back and re-shoot everything you already verified — adding hours to a job that's already behind.
With Sitemark: All shots are backed up automatically the moment you log them. Rain doesn't touch your data.
Two years after installation, a pipe sags. The property owner claims it was never graded correctly. You have no records from that job. It becomes a he-said-she-said dispute — and you're the contractor with insurance.
With Sitemark: Every shot is timestamped, GPS-tagged, and stored permanently. Your documentation is the record of work.
Every grade shot is automatically tagged with GPS coordinates, timestamp, and instrument info. No question about where or when.
Shots sync instantly when you have a connection, and queue for upload when you don't. Your data is never at risk from a lost phone or a dead battery.
Share a live link with the inspector, engineer, or client. Or generate a PDF on the spot. No emailing, no printing, no waiting.
Enter the design elevation. Log the actual reading. Sitemark calculates the deviation and flags anything out of tolerance. No math, no errors.
GPS-tagged, timestamped, always backed up, and shareable with the inspector in seconds. This is what field documentation should look like.
Start free trial →No credit card required.