User Guide

Contents

1. Setting up your practice
2. Finding your surveys
3. Recording a survey
4. Photographs
5. Generating the report
6. How findings are graded
7. Reviewing and editing
8. Exporting to Word
9. Your recordings and photos — keep your own copy
10. Plans, trials and report credits
11. On the boat: practical notes
12. If something goes wrong
13. Privacy and your clients' data

1. Setting up your practice

Create an account with your email address and a password — you are signed in straight away. Then open Settings, because what you put there appears on every report you ever export.

Practice details. Your name, practice name, address, telephone, business email, website and qualifications. These form the letterhead at the top of the exported document. Your logo is placed above the letterhead, centred — a wide landscape logo works better than a tall one.

Boilerplate. Four blocks of standing text that are reproduced word for word on every report and are never rewritten or summarised:

• Conditions of survey — printed near the front, before the findings.
• Valuation basis — your standard valuation wording and caveats, printed after the defect schedule.
• Disclaimers — printed after the valuation.
• Terms & conditions — printed last.

Paste in the wording you already use. Nothing you write here is altered, shortened or interpreted — it is your professional language and it goes out exactly as typed.

Your survey form. If you print a pro-forma and write into it aboard, upload the blank one — Word, PDF, plain text, or simply a photograph of it. It is read once for your sections and for the items printed under each of them, and your reports are then built to that structure. Because it is blank, there is nothing confidential on it.

Your form does two further things a finished report cannot. When you photograph a page you have filled in, it is read against the items your form prints rather than as loose notes — so a ticked box is understood as a ticked box, and what you actually wrote stands out from what you merely checked. And before you leave the boat, the coverage check works through your form item by item, so it can tell you that the starboard stern gear line is still empty rather than only that the section has something in it.

Example reports (writing style). Upload up to three of your own past survey reports (Word, PDF or plain text) and each is analysed once into a style profile — your register, your phrasing, how you word findings and recommendations. Every report drafted for you afterwards is written to match, and it follows your own section structure — taken from your blank form if you have uploaded one, otherwise from the first example report you upload. Your own style takes precedence over the app's defaults, so if you open findings a particular way, or rarely use a phrase the app would otherwise reach for, your reports follow you rather than the house habit. The uploaded document itself is not kept, and no boat or client details are carried into the profile. Regenerate an existing draft to apply a newly learned style to it.

Before you upload any examples, findings are written in a plain, varied survey register modelled on real UK survey reports: the observation stated directly, no single formula repeated down the page, and recommendations written as you dictated them.

Marine Survey Writer's name appears nowhere on your report. The document is yours, on your letterhead, and nothing identifies the tool that produced it.

2. Finding your surveys

The dashboard opens on your active surveys, newest first, with the three counters at the top showing how many surveys you have, how many recordings you have made, and how many drafts are ready to review.

Search finds any survey by vessel name, vessel type, client or location — for example "Bright Horizon", "Hartley", "Elizabeth Marina" or "Sealine". It searches everything on your account, so a list hundreds long never needs scrolling.

Active / Archived / All. Surveys load 25 at a time with a Load more button, and the count beneath tells you how many you are seeing of how many.

Archive takes a finished job off the working list without deleting anything — the survey, its report and its recordings all remain, and one click restores it. Archiving does not change how long recordings are kept (see section 9).

Delete is permanent and immediate. It destroys the report, every recording and every photograph, so you are asked to type the vessel name to confirm. A survey can be wanted years later for an insurance or liability claim — if you only want it out of the way, archive it.

3. Recording a survey

Create a survey from the dashboard. Choose the survey type — Pre-Purchase / Condition, Insurance, Damage or Safety — which sets the title of the exported report, then enter the vessel name, whether she is a motor boat, sailing yacht or RIB, and the manufacturer, model and year. Client and location are optional.

More vessel details opens four further optional fields: drive type, hull material, engine make and model, and length overall. None of them is required and a survey is never held up for want of them, but they are worth the few seconds when you have them. They sharpen the vessel research, and they give the consistency check (section 7) real particulars to test the draft against — it can only tell you that cutlass bearings have been reported on a sterndrive boat if it knows the boat has sterndrives.

Then use the big round button: Start recording, describe what you see in your own words, Stop recording when you want a break.

If you write instead of talk

Plenty of surveyors work on paper. Written notes on the survey screen takes photographs of the pages you wrote on board and reads them into findings, exactly as a recording is read. You can use both on the same survey — talk on deck, write in the saloon, and everything ends up in the same report.

Photograph one page at a time, in reasonable light, with the whole sheet in frame. Each page is read and then shown back to you before anything is drafted:

• Every number and unit is listed separately for you to check off against the page. This is deliberate — "3cm" and "3mm" differ by one letter and a factor of ten, and no sentence around them can settle which you wrote.
• Anything open to two readings is raised, never guessed. If you wrote "Std", you are asked whether that is starboard rather than having it decided for you.
• Crossed-out words are left out and listed, so a correction you made on the page cannot creep back into the report.
• If writing runs to the edge of the photo you are warned, because a word that was never in the frame cannot be read and nothing else would tell you it is missing. Retake the page, or confirm you have checked it.

Correct anything you like in the text boxes, then Confirm page. The confirmed notes join your recordings and the report is generated from both together. Retake page replaces the page you are looking at rather than adding another, so a better photograph of the same sheet does not leave the old one behind.

If you write on your own printed form

Upload your blank pro-forma in Settings (see section 1) and photographed pages are read against it — matched to the items your form prints rather than treated as loose prose. Three things change on the confirmation screen:

• What you wrote is shown under its printed item, with the same value-by-value checking as any other page.
• Items you only ticked are shown as a row of chips, not as findings. On a form where you tick forty boxes and write against six, turning every tick into its own finding would bury the six that matter. Ticked items are still recorded — they become one line per section saying what was checked and found satisfactory, which is what a report should say about them. Click any chip that was not actually ticked to leave it out.
• Printed items with nothing written against them are listed. This never blocks you: leaving a line blank is often right, because a boat with no bow thruster has no bow thruster to record. It is there so that nothing is missed by accident while you are still standing on the vessel.

Anything you write outside the printed items — a note in a margin, an extra observation on the back of the sheet — is kept as an ordinary note. Nothing is forced onto a line it does not belong to.

Before you go: vessel research

On the survey screen, Vessel research looks up the make and model you entered: builder background, key figures, and known issues reported for that model by owners, forums and surveyors, with suggested points worth checking on board and links to the sources. Run it when you create the survey and read it before you travel; it stays saved with the survey, so it is on your phone at the boat.

Research runs once per survey. A dossier on a given boat does not change from one day to the next, so once it has run the button shows Research complete and the result stays with the survey. If it fails, nothing is saved and you can simply run it again. If you typed the make or model wrongly, correct it on the survey and the research will run once more for the corrected boat.

It is background research, nothing more. Treat every item as something to verify on the vessel — and note that none of it is ever written into your report. The report contains only what you dictated: a "known issue" you did not actually observe has no place in a document that may one day be your defence.

Before you leave: the coverage check

When you think you have finished recording, tap Check coverage. It reads everything you have dictated against your report's own sections and lists any section with nothing recorded against it — the electronic version of walking your template one last time before you pack up. A statement that something was not inspected, or is excluded, counts as covered: an exclusion is a recorded decision, not a gap. Run it while you are still on the boat, while a walk back costs a minute rather than a second visit.

If you have uploaded your blank form (section 1) the check goes a level deeper: as well as whole sections, it works through the individual items your form prints and lists any with nothing against them. That is usually where the real miss is — not a section you forgot entirely, but the one fitting left out of a section that otherwise looks complete. Items are matched on meaning rather than wording, so a sweeping "all the deck fittings were checked and are fine" covers the items it plainly refers to.

Pausing does not split a finding

This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes dictating a survey bearable. Stop and start as often as you like. If you break off halfway through describing something — to look closer, to take a measurement, to move round the vessel, or simply because you are thinking how to word it — just carry on when you resume.

When the report is generated, every recording for the survey is read in order, as one continuous account. Where a finding begins and ends is worked out from what you actually said, never from where you happened to stop. So:

• One recording can contain several findings — they will be separated.
• One finding can span several recordings — they will be joined, and the report shows "from recordings 3, 4" so you can play them all back.
• A long silence in the middle of a recording is just you thinking. It is not treated as the end of anything.

Dictating well

• Name the component first. "Stern drives — both sets of bellows are perished…" gives the report a clear subject and puts the finding in the right section.
• Say the grade if you know it. "…this needs replacing urgently" or "cosmetic at this stage, worth monitoring" is used directly for the defect schedule.
• Say what you did as well as what you found. "The topsides were sounded throughout with a percussion hammer and no significant moisture readings were recorded" reads as a survey; "hull fine" does not.
• Say when you could not inspect something. "The starboard impeller could not be accessed without dismantling the pump, so it is excluded from this report" belongs in the report, and only you can say it.
• Speak the numbers. Dimensions, percentages, hours and dates are transcribed accurately and carry into the report.

Your recordings appear in a list beneath the button as you go, with their length and how many photos are attached. The screen stays awake while a recording is open, so the phone will not doze off mid-finding. When you stop, the recording uploads and is transcribed on our servers — the text appears in the list a few seconds later, so there is nothing to type. Tap any recording's text to edit its transcript once it has arrived — useful for an unusual boat name or a term the transcription mis-heard.

4. Photographs

Add photo attaches a photograph to a recording automatically. There is no matching-up step afterwards: the photo belongs to whatever you were describing, and it follows that finding into the report and the Word document.

Tap it while a recording is open and the photograph goes to that recording. Tap it with nothing recording and it goes to your most recent one — so "describe the defect, stop, photograph it" pairs up exactly the same as photographing mid-sentence. Photographs taken before you have recorded anything at all are held and attached to your first recording.

Take as many photographs per finding as you need; you can select several at once.

In the finished report each photograph appears beneath the finding it belongs to, and in the exported Word document they appear as numbered plates — "Plate 15 — finding 18" — so a client can refer to them precisely.

Photographs are resized when they are uploaded. They stay easily sharp enough to print, and to zoom into a detail later, but a survey's worth of them uploads over a marina's mobile signal in a fraction of the time the originals would take.

5. Generating the report

When you have finished recording, tap Create report. Your recordings are read as one continuous account and turned into formal survey prose, arranged into sections by the component each finding concerns:

Scope of Survey — your opening statement of what was surveyed, where, and in what conditions
Hull & Structure · Deck & Superstructure · Machinery & Propulsion · Electrical Systems · Plumbing & Seacocks · Steering & Controls · Safety Equipment · General & Cosmetic
Summary & Conclusions — your closing remarks
Defect schedule — every graded finding, most serious first

The report contains only what you dictated. Nothing is invented — no cause, no recommendation and no grade that you did not give. Where a note is too fragmentary to make a finding, it is reproduced plainly rather than padded out.

Transcription can mis-hear an unusual marine term, and where the intended word is obvious from context the report writes the correct one. Always read the finished text: it is your report and your professional judgement, not ours.

Generating a report takes under a minute for a long survey. You can regenerate as often as you like, and it costs nothing extra.

6. How findings are graded

Each finding is given one of three grades, or no grade at all, based on how you described it:

• A - Urgent — safety-critical, or something you called urgent, immediate or unsafe.
• B - Attention required — a defect needing repair, replacement or servicing.
• C - Monitor — cosmetic or minor; worth watching but no action now.
• No grade — not a defect. Anything you reported as sound, working, in date, clean or free from a fault, plus your opening scope and closing summary.

Only graded findings appear in the defect schedule, ordered A, then B, then C. Clean findings stay in the body of the report where they belong — a client should be able to read that the batteries held charge overnight without it appearing on a list of defects.

Check every grade before you export. Grading is a first pass over your own words and it is occasionally arguable — a component you called "past its best" might be graded B where you would have said C. The judgement is yours, and the schedule follows what the report says, so correcting the wording corrects the grade on the next regeneration.

7. Reviewing and editing

On the report screen every paragraph is editable in place. Beside each finding you will see its number, its grade, how many photographs are attached, and a player for the original recording — so you can listen to exactly what you said while you read what was written.

Save edits keeps your changes.
Regenerate draft rebuilds the report from the transcripts. Your previous version is kept, so regenerating is never destructive — but a fresh draft is written from the recordings, so hand edits are not carried into it. Edit first and regenerate first, not the other way round.

If you correct a recording's transcript on the capture screen and then regenerate, the report is rebuilt from the corrected text. That is usually the better way to fix a mis-heard word: fix it once at source rather than in every place it appears.

The consistency check

Consistency check proofreads the draft for statements that contradict the vessel's particulars or each other — a fin keel described on a bilge-keeled boat, port and starboard swapped between findings, a component reported sound in one place and defective in another, or a garbled sentence worth playing back before export. In a dispute, one factual inconsistency can discredit an otherwise sound report, which is why this check exists.

Every flag is something to verify, not a verdict — you are the surveyor, and the check never changes a word of your report. Run it again after editing or regenerating; it always checks the latest version of the draft, and it tells you if the draft has changed since it last ran.

8. Exporting to Word

Export to Word downloads a .docx file containing your logo and letterhead, your conditions of survey, every section and finding, your photographs as numbered plates, the defect schedule, and your valuation basis, disclaimers and terms — ready for final polish in Word before you issue it.

The file is a genuine Word document, so the photographs are visible as soon as it opens; you do not need to click "Enable Editing" first.

You can export as many times as you like while you are editing; it does not cost an extra credit each time.

9. Your recordings and photos — keep your own copy

Everything is kept for as long as your account has an active plan or report credits. While you are entitled, nothing is removed — your plan is also your archive.

When your subscription ends — cancelled or simply not renewed — your whole account is deleted 14 days after the end of the paid period: surveys, reports, recordings and photographs, all of it. Cancelling early never shortens the period you have paid for; the clock starts when the paid period ends. We email you at that point and again 7 days before deletion, and restarting a plan or buying a report credit before the date keeps the account exactly as it is. Accounts that never take a plan or credit are deleted 90 days after signup, and recordings and photographs on an account without a plan are removed 30 days after you last work on a survey.

Your report text and transcripts stay for as long as your account exists — they are never removed on the 30-day media cycle, so while you have an account you can always reopen a survey, edit it, regenerate it and export it again.

Whatever your plan, we recommend using Download archive on the report screen when a job is finished. It gives you one ZIP file holding the report, every recording and every photograph — your own offsite copy, on your own computer, to keep for as long as your professional and insurance obligations require. If your account has lapsed, the report screen shows the date your media will be removed.

Download archive is a desktop feature. A full survey can run to hundreds of megabytes, which a phone browser cannot assemble reliably.

Need the photographs back later? Open the survey and upload that ZIP back in. Everything is restored to the right findings, and you can regenerate and export with the photographs included. On an account with an active plan the restored files are kept like any other media; on a lapsed account they are kept for 7 days. Upload the ZIP exactly as you received it — if the files inside have been renamed we cannot tell which finding they belong to.

A survey whose media has been removed still exports, but it will export without photographs — and the app warns you before it does.

10. Plans, trials and report credits

Recording, generating and editing reports is unrestricted. Payment applies when you export.

Promo code. If you have been given a code, enter it in the promo code box when you create your account and any access it carries is applied straight away.

11. On the boat: practical notes

• You need a connection to save recordings. Each recording uploads when you stop it. If you lose signal the app tells you rather than failing silently — but do not walk away from a survey with recordings that have not uploaded.
• Transcription happens on our servers, after upload. You do not have to wait for it. Record everything, and by the time you sit down the transcripts are ready.
• There is no limit on recording length. A two-hour survey is fine.
• iPhone and iPad work exactly the same way. Recordings are transcribed after upload like everywhere else, so nothing needs typing in afterwards.
• Keep the screen awake while recording if your device is set to lock quickly — recording in a browser stops when the page is suspended.
• Wind and machinery noise degrade transcription like any microphone. Shielding the phone, or holding it closer, is worth more than speaking louder.

12. If something goes wrong

A recording has no transcript. It appears in the report under Recordings Awaiting Transcript rather than being dropped. Wait a moment and regenerate — transcription may still be running. If it failed, play the audio and type the text on the capture screen, then regenerate.

A word is consistently mis-heard. Correct it in the recording's transcript on the capture screen and regenerate; that fixes it everywhere at once.

A finding is in the wrong section, or graded wrongly. Edit the paragraph and save. If the wording that caused it was mis-transcribed, fix the transcript and regenerate instead.

The exported report has no photographs. Its recordings and photographs have passed the 30-day mark and been deleted. Upload your archive back into the survey and export again (section 9).

The archive will not download. Try it on a desktop browser; a large survey is too big for a phone to assemble.

Anything else: [email protected].

13. Privacy and your clients' data

A survey contains commercially sensitive material — a vessel's condition, its location, its owner's details — often during a sale negotiation. So it is worth being clear about where it goes.

• Your audio recordings never leave our servers. Transcription runs on our own machine, not a third-party service.
• Your photographs never leave our servers and are never sent to any AI service.
• Only the transcript text is sent to Anthropic, to draft the report in survey register. It is not used to train AI models.
• Surveys, recordings, photographs and backups are stored in the European Union, encrypted in transit and at rest, and isolated per account.

Deleting your account is final. Settings → Delete account asks you to confirm; once you do, your account and everything in it — surveys, reports, recordings, photographs, practice details — is permanently destroyed and cannot be recovered, by you or by us. Export your reports and download your archives before you confirm.

Full detail is in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. You remain the data controller for your clients' information; we process it only to provide the service to you.