FieldReport

1Getting started

FieldReport turns what you record on a tract into a finished PDF and sends it — without typing anything twice.

There is nothing to download from an app store. FieldReport installs straight from its web address and then behaves like any other app on the device.

iPhone and iPad

1. Open the app link in Safari

   Use the address your office gave you. It has to be Safari — Chrome and Firefox on iPhone can't install web apps.

2. Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen

   Share is the square with an arrow coming out of the top. You may need to scroll down the list to find Add to Home Screen.

3. Tap Add

   A green tree icon appears on your home screen.

4. Open it from that icon and enter the passcode

   It runs full screen with no browser bars. You'll only be asked for the passcode once — it's remembered for a year.

Android

1. Open the app link in Chrome
2. Tap the ⋮ menu, then Install app

   Depending on your Android version it may say Add to Home screen instead. Either is the same thing.

3. Open it from the home screen and enter the passcode

Mac, Windows and Linux

Useful in the office for reviewing reports, resending, and changing settings on a full-size screen.

1. Open the app link in Chrome or Edge
2. Click the install icon in the address bar

   A small monitor with a downward arrow, at the right-hand end of the address bar. Or use the ⋮ menu → Cast, save and share → Install page as app.

3. On Safari for Mac

   File → Add to Dock. Safari 17 or later.

What you can record

2The five tabs

Everything lives behind five buttons along the bottom of the screen.

General Consultation — work that is not a report

Advisory work, an operations review, a job that does not fit any of the other activities. Four things go in it: who the client is, what the project is, and the hours. Nothing else is asked for.

It stays open while you work on it. Add a row of hours each day or each visit — time in, time out — and leave it. It waits under In progress on the Activities tab under the project name, and you pick it up where you left off. Only tap Activity Complete when the job is done: filing is what makes it available to invoice from, and a filed record cannot be added to.

Then Bill from a report on an invoice turns the hours into charge lines, grouped by role, with the mileage. Hours marked not billable are still counted for your own records but never reach the invoice.

The hours print on this record, unlike every other activity, because on work billed by the hour they are the evidence for the invoice — a client asked to pay for fourteen hours can see which days they were and what was done. The times only: no rates, no totals in money. What it comes to is the invoice's business, so the two documents cannot end up disagreeing about the same job.

A record you have not filed yet lives on this phone only — it is not on the server and not in any backup. On a job running for weeks, file it every week or two and start a fresh one rather than letting a month build up in one.

Hours: logging time, and what has not been invoiced

Tap the clock in the middle of the Hours tab, under the filters, to write an hour down. It asks only about the hour — who, the day, in and out, what you did — and not which job it was for, because at the end of a day covering three jobs that is the question that stops it getting written down at all.

Hours logged this way wait under Not on a job yet until you say what they were for. Tap one and put it on any job still open, or start a General Consultation for it there and then. They are kept on the server, not on the phone, so they survive it.

Under that, what has been recorded and never charged for: the money, the hours, and how many reports. Tap it for the list. Each one can be billed there and then, or marked already settled if it went out on an invoice typed up some other way — that changes no money, it only takes it off the list.

Reports filed before this existed have nothing linking them to their invoices, so the first time you open it there is a line at the bottom to say everything above was invoiced another way. Use it once, at the start.

Leads, and the follow-up

It takes several conversations to turn a name into a job, and the one that gets forgotten is the third. The top of Activities says how many people you are due to contact and who they are; tap it for the full list.

Add anyone worth ringing — a referral, someone met at a field day, a landowner who called in — with whatever you know: phone, county, what they have got, and where the name came from.

Tap the handset on a row to ring them. The number dials straight from the list — no reading it out and typing it into the Phone app. When you come back to FieldReport afterwards it opens their record, with the log ready on top of it and Call already picked — so their history and what you know about them are right there while you write, and still there when you close it. All that is left is what was said and when to come back. On the person's own screen the number and the email address are both buttons; the email one does the same thing.

If you tap a number and change your mind, nothing is logged — the app only offers when you have actually been away long enough to have spoken to somebody. It also works when the phone shuts the app down during a long call: it picks the call back up when you next open it, for up to an hour and a half.

Logging a contact sets the next one. They are the same action on purpose, because splitting them is how the next call stops happening. Tap the person, tap Call or No answer, say what was said, and pick when to come back — two weeks, a month, six months, a year. A contact takes about as long to write down as it took to make.

What you know about them is kept apart from what was said on any one call. When you log a contact there are two boxes: what was said, which belongs to that call, and anything worth having next time — a daughter starting at State, a preference for texts, a bad knee. The second builds up into a short dated list that sits on their record and in front of you the next time you log a call, so the next conversation can start where the last one left off.

Where it stands is one tap: Talking, Proposal out, Won, Lost — or Not now, which is not the same as lost. A landowner who says "not until I retire" is the best kind of lead, and the app keeps counting down to him for as long as it takes.

Already keeping a list somewhere? Import from a sheet takes it off the clipboard. Select the rows in Google Sheets — headings and all — copy, and paste. The app works out which column is the name, which is the phone, which is the follow-up date, and shows you what it made of the first few rows before anything is saved; correct anything it got wrong from the dropdowns. Rows with no follow-up date get one you choose, so nobody lands in a list that never comes back up. If your sheet records when you last spoke to someone, that becomes the first entry in their history. Pasting the same sheet twice updates people rather than making a second of each.

Anyone due to be contacted also shows up under What's due on the Tracts tab, beside the deadlines and the unanswered proposals, so there is one list of what needs doing rather than several.

When a lead turns into work, Start a proposal for them carries the name, phone and county straight into the proposal, and from there into the invoice. Nothing gets typed twice.

Money

Reached from the money line on Today. One screen for one question — am I owed anything: what clients owe and how late it is, proposals still awaiting an answer, and hours that have been worked and never charged for. Those three used to be on three different tabs, which meant the question had no answer.

That's the whole app. If you can find those three, you can find everything.

3Filing a report

Pick the activity, work down the sections, tap Activity Complete. The app handles the rest.

1. Open Activities and choose what you're doing

   A timber cruise, a spray record, a stand visit, an invoice — each activity type is listed with an icon. Tapping one always starts a new one; anything you have already begun is under In progress above.

2. Work down the sections

   Tap a section header to open it. They're in the order you'd normally work: who the client is, where the tract is, then what you found.

   You do not have to fill them in order, and you don't have to finish in one go.

3. Watch the badge on each section

   The small tag on the right of each section header tells you where you stand at a glance.

4. Tap Activity Complete

   The app checks that nothing required is missing, stamps the finish time, and asks who should receive it.

Reading the section badges

More than one on the go

You can have as many part-written reports as you like, including several of the same kind — four invoices at month end, or a planting report for one tract and another for the next.

• To start a new one, tap the activity in the list. It always begins fresh.
• To carry on with one, tap it under In progress. Each row names the client or tract so you can tell two invoices apart, and shows when you last touched it.

Finishing or discarding one leaves the others exactly where they were.

Filling in tables

Tables are for anything you record more than once — tally rows, products applied, load tickets, findings.

• Tap + Add Row to add one.
• Tap ⧉ on a row to duplicate it. This is the fast way to tally similar trees — copy the last row and change the diameter.
• Tap to delete a row.
• Columns that number themselves — the plot number on a check plot — carry on from the row above. Add or duplicate a row and it becomes the next one along, so plot 4 gives you plot 5. Type over it if you number them some other way.

Columns that work themselves out — a line total from quantity times price — fill in as you type the other two.

4What fills itself in

A second visit to a tract you already know should need almost nothing typed.

The app fills what it can before you start. Anything it filled flashes green briefly, so you can see what it did and check it.

The location button

At the top of a form: Fill county & weather from location.

One tap takes a GPS reading and fills in the county, the state, and the current conditions. If you've already allowed location access, it happens quietly when the form opens and you'll just see the fields flash green.

Recent clients and recent tracts

Chips across the top of the form. Tap one and the whole block fills — name, address, phone, email, or tract number, county, acres, stand details.

This list builds itself from reports you've already filed. There's nothing to set up and nothing to maintain. Sample reports never appear here, so demo data can't leak into real work.

What you should always check

Autofill is a head start, not an answer. Two things worth a glance every time:

• The tract. If you carried a block over from a previous report, make sure it's the right property.
• Acres. These carry forward, and they're the number everything else is calculated from.

On day one, load the practice scenario

A brand-new app remembers nothing, so every dropdown starts empty and everything is free text. That is the one day it looks least like itself.

Load the practice scenario from Settings and the whole app fills in: properties and clients in the dropdowns, tasks on the timesheet, real numbers on the Hours tab. It is a complete run of work — a proposal accepted, the work reported, invoices raised from those reports, a payment against one — so you can see how the pieces feed each other before any of it is yours. Remove it when you are done and everything it taught the dropdowns goes with it.

Client numbers

A client is given a number — C-001, C-002 — when their first report or invoice is filed, and keeps it from then on. It appears on their documents and follows them onto everything filed afterwards, so two invoices a year apart are obviously the same person.

Clients you already had before this existed do not have numbers, and if they are left that way the next new client to file takes C-001. Under Settings → Client numbers there is a one-off that numbers everyone already on the books, oldest first, so the numbers say something about how long somebody has been a client. Worth doing once, before the next new client.

It stays blank while you are still typing the first one; the number is given when the document is filed, so nothing is used up by a report that gets abandoned. And if you already number your clients, type yours in — the app never overwrites a number that is already there, and will carry it forward instead.

Fields remember what you have typed

Any field that names a thing — a task, a tract, a client, a product, a mill, a stand — offers what you have used before, most-used first, as you type. It is a memory rather than a rule: the list is there when the answer is one you have given before, and you can always type something new.

Nothing maintains that list. It is read back out of the reports you have already filed, so it is correct by construction and it disappears if the reports do.

A product brings its own details with it

On a spray record, type a product into Brand Name and the EPA Reg. #, Active Ingredient, Formulation and RUP cells fill themselves from the last time you used it. They flash green, same as anything else the app filled.

Those four are properties of the product — they are identical on every job that used the same jug. The rate, the total used and the acres are properties of the day, so they are never carried over. You would otherwise end up with a record quietly claiming this job used the same amount as the last one.

The product list you start with

Brand Name comes preloaded with the herbicides used in southern pine work — Arsenal AC, Chopper GEN2, Accord XRT II, Oust XP, Escort XP, Velpar L VU and DF VU, Garlon 3A and 4 Ultra, Vastlan, Transline, Milestone, Krenite S, Oustar. Pick one and the active ingredient and EPA registration number both fill in. Your own products go above the list as soon as you have used them once.

Each carries a short line about what it is for, and where there is something you need to know, it says so:

• The three triclopyrs are three products. Garlon 3A is the water-soluble amine and the one labelled for use over standing water. Garlon 4 Ultra is the oil-soluble ester — basal bark and dormant stem, never over water. Vastlan is a third salt again. The app names the salt rather than writing "Triclopyr" three times, because on a record that distinction is what says whether the application was legal.
• Milestone warns you. It is not labelled for forest sites federally. Forestry use in NC is only legal under SLN NC-120003 or NC-120010, which you must have with you — and both expire 31 December 2027.
• Cancelled products are caught. Type "Velpar L" from memory and it tells you that registration ended on 15 November 2018 and points you at Velpar L VU. Same for Velpar DF and Velpar ULW.

5Photos, signatures, location

Everything you'd otherwise carry a camera, a clipboard and a GPS unit for.

Photos

Tap ＋ in a photo section — the camera opens, or you can pick from your library. Photos are shrunk automatically before they're stored, so a full set doesn't slow anything down.

Tap the dark strip across the bottom of a photo to caption it. Captions print underneath the photo on the report, so they're worth adding for anything a client might not recognise.

Signatures

Sign with a finger. Clear wipes it and you can start again.

Where a client signature is expected and nobody's there, tick the Not present box. That prints a proper note on the report rather than leaving a blank line, which reads much better than an unexplained gap.

GPS location

Tap Capture in a GPS section. It records the coordinates and the accuracy, and prints them on the report.

Unlike the weather lookup, this works with no signal — it's the phone's own GPS.

6The stand table

On a timber cruise you tally trees. You never type a stand summary — the app works it out, and shows you while you're still standing on the plot.

Open Computed Stand Table while you're tallying. It updates as you add rows, and gives you:

• Basal area per acre, trees per acre, quadratic mean diameter
• Volume per acre and for the whole tract, split by species and by product
• The sampling error on that estimate, at 95% confidence

Why the sampling error matters

It tells you whether you have enough plots before you leave the tract. That's the difference between finishing a cruise and driving back out to it.

6bPlanting check plots

You drop plots while the crew is still on the tract, so the answer has to arrive while you can still do something about it. Add a plot, and the summary updates.

On a Site Prep & Planting report, open Planting Check Plots and add a row for each plot you run. One row per plot, filled in as you walk it.

Set Check Plot Size once, up in Planting Operation. 1/35 acre is a 20-foot cord, and the seedlings in the plot times 35 is trees per acre.

What you are looking for

This is what right looks like:

And these are the four ways it goes wrong. Only J-rooting needs a shovel:

Why “Dug” is its own column

Depth, packing and microsite you can judge on every seedling in the plot. J-rooting you can only find by lifting one — so the two go against different counts.

The report scores J-rooting against the seedlings you actually dug, and prints which count it used beside every rate. Score it against the plot instead and a real 15% problem prints as under 2%.

What the summary tells you

Open Check Plot Summary as you go. It gives you stocking against your target with the spread across plots, a rate for each of the four problems, and a verdict in words.

Out of the box that's correction above 10% on any one problem, or below a 90% workmanship score. Those two numbers live in the activity template, so they can be changed to match what your planting contracts actually say.

Why the score is often a range

Say a plot of ten comes out 3 shallow, 2 loose, 1 poor microsite. Six problems — but how many bad trees? The tally can't say, because it never recorded which tree had what.

So the score is reported as a range, rather than the app picking an end and being confidently wrong in a direction that costs somebody money. If the range straddles the 90% floor it says so instead of guessing.

To get an exact score, fill in Defective (any) — how many separate trees had at least one problem. You're handling each seedling anyway, so it's a count you already know, and it settles the question for good.

A plot, worked through

One row from a real walk, and what the app does with it:

Ten plots like that make the job figures. Ten × 16 is 160 seedlings assessed and 20 dug, so the job's depth rate is out of 160 and its J-root rate is out of 20 — which is the whole reason the report prints the count it used next to every rate.

When J-rooting says “uncertain”

Two seedlings a plot over eight plots is sixteen dug. Sixteen isn't enough to tell a real 10% apart from a real 15% — so when the answer lands near the threshold the report says uncertain rather than calling it, and tells you roughly how many more you'd have to dig to be sure.

That's not the app being coy. It's the honest reading, and it matters because a penalty can hang off that number. What sixteen digs will catch reliably is genuinely bad work — a crew J-rooting one in five gets flagged nearly every time.

The plot map

The summary draws where your plots fell, shaded by how bad each one was. That's the thing a single average hides: eight plots averaging fine, with every bad one in the same corner, is a different problem from eight mediocre plots spread evenly.

With no coordinates it draws your stand shape scaled to the acreage and spaces the plots out on it — useful on its own, because it shows you the corner you haven't sampled yet.

Tap Locate in a plot's Where column and it draws that plot where it actually was, to scale, with a ring showing how good the fix was. Under canopy that ring is often wider than the plot itself, which is the honest picture. You need most of the plots located before it switches — a map made of two real positions and six guesses would be worse than the sketch.

7Sending the report

Choose who gets it. It waits five minutes before it actually leaves, so you get a chance to change your mind. If there's no signal it waits longer and sends itself later.

Choosing recipients

1. Type an address and tap Add

   Or just tap Send — it takes whatever's in the box. You won't lose an address by forgetting to tap Add.

2. Use the suggested addresses

   Any email address you entered on the form itself is offered as a chip. Tap to add it.

3. Leave Remember these ticked

   Next time you file this kind of report, the same people are filled in for you.

4. Add a note if it needs one

   It goes in the body of the email, above the attachment.

Five minutes to change your mind

Completing a report does not put it in someone's inbox straight away. The report is filed immediately — it has its number, the PDF exists, it's in History. Only the email waits.

While it's waiting, a banner sits across the top counting down:

Two buttons on that banner:

• Send now — don't wait, go.
• Undo — stop it. It asks you to confirm, then the report stays filed but is never emailed. It's still in History and you can send it from there whenever you want.

The countdown is kept on the server, not on your phone. Closing the app, losing signal, or a flat battery doesn't cancel it and doesn't stop it — the report still goes at the five-minute mark. If sending then fails, the banner tells you why rather than going quiet.

Email / Share

On the finished screen and on any past report, there's an Email / Share button. This hands the PDF to your phone's own share sheet — Mail, Messages, AirDrop, anything installed.

Sent this way the report comes from you, not from the office address. Useful when you want it to come from you personally, or when you just want to AirDrop it to someone standing next to you.

7bTracts & what's due

You think in properties. So does the Tracts tab.

Every report you file carries the tract, so the app groups them for you. Open a property and you get everything ever done on it in one thread — proposals, cruises, spray records, planting, sales, invoices — newest first, with what is still owed on it.

It is the fastest way to answer "what have we done here?" before a landowner call.

What's due

At the top of the same tab. Built from dates you have already recorded, so there is nothing extra to keep up:

• Release and site prep treatments scheduled but not yet done
• BMP corrections a logger still owes you
• Timber sale contracts running out
• Action items from a management plan
• Contractor certificates expiring or lapsed
• Proposals about to go stale

Red is overdue, amber is within thirty days. Tap anything to jump to the property it belongs to.

8Finding past reports

Every report you've completed, newest first.

The screen is grouped, so what needs you is above what doesn't:

In Completed, the coloured dot on the right of each row tells you what happened to it:

Tap any report to open it. From there you can:

• Open PDF — read it exactly as it was sent
• Email / Share — send it from your own account
• Resend — send it again, to the same people or different ones
• Delete — remove it permanently

Reopening one that hasn't gone out

If a report has not been successfully emailed to anybody, it also has a Reopen button. That turns it back into a draft you can carry on working on — useful when you finish a report in the truck and then realise you want to add the last two plots.

• It keeps its number. Nobody ever saw the first version, so reusing the number leaves no gap in the sequence and no two documents wearing the same one.
• It drops out of History until you complete it again.
• If it was in the five-minute hold, that's cancelled. Reopening something means it is not going out.

The version you reopened isn't thrown away — it's archived on the server. If you ever need to show what the first one said, it's still there.

Reports tagged SAMPLE are demonstration data, not real records. See Settings.

8bProposals & invoices

The paperwork that comes before the work, and the paperwork that gets you paid for it.

Both work like any other activity — pick it, fill it in, complete it. Because they use the same client and tract fields as everything else, a proposal for a landowner you already work with fills in from one tap on their chip.

Writing a proposal

A proposal is the one document a landowner reads before deciding to pay you, so it is laid out in the order they read it, not the order you work it.

• What you want from the property — in their words. It opens the page: "You told me you want…"
• What I recommend — what you will do, in words they can picture. What, where, roughly how much, and why. Keep the technique for the fine print.
• What to expect — your estimate of what a sale will bring, and where that number comes from. Fill it in even on a fixed-fee job: the proposal then says "the work priced here is about 5% of what the sale should bring you", which is the sentence that gets the signature.
• How we will work together — already written. It tells a nervous landowner that every decision stays theirs. Change it until it sounds like you.
• What it costs — one line per item. Quantity and rate, or an amount for a lump sum.
• When — phases with dates.
• Fine print — what the price assumes and leaves out. Two minutes here stops an argument later about whether road work was included.
• About your forester — two or three sentences. Registration, what you have done, what you do most. It sits just above the signature line on purpose.

Billing from work you already recorded

Tap Bill from a report at the top of an invoice or proposal. It lists completed reports for that client and pulls the charges straight out of them — every site-prep contractor cost, every seedling lot, the planting rate. A timber sale brings its commission across instead: gross proceeds and your percentage, already calculated.

The client and tract come with it, so an invoice for work already reported needs almost nothing typed.

If the invoice already has charges on it you are asked first — Add keeps what is there, which is what you want when one invoice covers several reports, and Replace clears the lines first. A report you have already pulled in is marked already added in the list, so it is hard to do twice by accident.

Either way you get an Undo for a few seconds afterwards, and it puts the invoice back exactly as it was.

Raising an invoice

• Charges — same line items as a proposal.
• Timber sale commission — enter gross proceeds and your percentage, and it calculates the fee. Leave blank if the invoice is line items only.
• Payments received — each deposit or part payment. The balance updates as you add them.
• Retainage — if the client is holding a percentage back.

The total, tax, and balance are calculated for you and shown live as you type. Payment terms produce a due date automatically — NET 30 on an invoice dated 12 August is due 11 September, and the invoice says so.

Crew and subcontractor costs

On a job where you are paying a planting or spray crew, record what each crew charged you and what you billed the client for their work. The app shows your margin on the job while you build the invoice.

What you are owed

Open History and any unpaid invoices appear at the top: the total outstanding, how much of it is overdue, and a bar showing how old the debt is. Oldest first, because that is the order you chase in.

Tap any line to open that invoice and resend it.

Where payment instructions come from

They are set once in Settings → Payment instructions: who checks are payable to, where to send them, ACH details, late terms. Every invoice and proposal prints them automatically.

If one job settles differently — through an escrow account, say — fill in Payment instructions for this invoice only on that invoice and it replaces them just for that document.

Recording a payment

Open the invoice from History and tap + Record a payment. Enter the amount, the date, how it came in, and a check number or reference.

The balance updates immediately and the invoice drops off the outstanding list once it is covered. Part payments are fine — record each one as it arrives.

What happened to the proposal

A proposal goes out and then, weeks later, someone says yes, says no, or says nothing at all. The last of those is the expensive one — an unanswered proposal is not a lost job, it is a phone call nobody made.

Open Tracts and the proposal card shows how many are still out and what they are worth. Tap through and anything quiet for more than a fortnight sits at the top under Worth a phone call. Tap a proposal to record what the client said.

Recording an answer does not change the proposal. Same rule as a payment against an invoice: the document the client priced from stays exactly as it was sent, and the answer is kept alongside it. Record a different answer later and both are kept — a proposal declined and then accepted is a story worth having.

8cHours & rates

Time gets recorded on the job it was spent on, which is the only place anyone will reliably enter it. The app does the adding up.

Putting hours on a report

Every field report has an Hours table near the bottom. One row per person per stretch of work: the date, who, their role, time in, time out, and a break in minutes if they took one. You never type a duration — the app works it out, including shifts that run past midnight.

Leave Billable alone and the time is billed. Set it to No for travel, office work or anything you are not charging for; the hours are still counted, they just do not reach an invoice. Miles is for the trip, charged at the mileage rate in Settings.

A new row already knows most of itself

Tap Add Row on the Hours table and it arrives filled in: today's date, whoever is set as the default person, their usual role, the activity as the task, and billable. On the second and later rows the time in is the time out of the row above, because that is how a day actually runs.

Everything is still editable — it is a starting point, not a decision. In practice it means a day's work costs you two taps and two times.

Setting the rates

In Settings → Hours and rates, each role carries two numbers:

• Bill — what the client is charged. This prints on the invoice.
• Cost — what you pay the person. This never appears on anything a client sees. It exists so the Hours tab can show you whether a job was worth doing.

Add the people you work with under People, one per line, and they become a dropdown on every timesheet — a name typed three ways is three people as far as a total is concerned.

Round each entry sets the billing increment, a quarter hour by default. Rounding is applied to each row rather than the total, which is what a client can check against their own notes. Pay is always worked out on the actual time, not the rounded time.

Reading hours back

The Hours tab shows everything recorded, filtered by date, person, property, or billable and not. It totals hours, what was billed, what the labour cost, and the margin left over — broken down by person, by property and by task.

This is the one screen that shows cost and margin. It is for you, not for a client, and nothing on it is printed.

Getting hours onto an invoice

Same as any other billable work: open a new invoice and use Bill from a report. The hours come across grouped by role, with the dates and who worked them in the detail line. Non-billable time is left behind, and mileage comes across as its own line.

8dContractors & certificates

Crews you work with, and the paperwork that has to be on hand before they set foot on a client's property.

Settings → Contractors. Add a logging contractor, planting crew, nursery or applicator once, with their contact details and certification.

Practice data

Settings → Practice → Load the practice scenario builds a run of connected work you can click through: a proposal accepted, the work reported, an invoice raised from that report, a payment recorded against it, and a timber sale settled on commission.

It is the fastest way to see how the pieces feed each other. Unlike the sample reports, practice data behaves like the real thing everywhere — it shows in what you are owed, fills the contractor dropdowns, and feeds autofill. Every page is still watermarked, and one tap removes all of it.

Where insurance certificates go

Open the contractor and tap + Add a certificate. Choose the type, who issued it, the policy number, when it expires, and attach the PDF or a photo of it.

You can pull the file back up any time from the same screen — useful when a landowner or a mill asks to see it.

They fill the dropdowns too

Anyone on file appears as a dropdown on the report forms rather than a box to type into — the logging contractor on a timber sale, the site prep contractor and nursery on a reforestation report, the crew on an invoice.

That matters more than it sounds. A contractor typed three slightly different ways is three different contractors as far as every report and total is concerned.

Fields with nobody on file yet stay as ordinary text boxes, so nothing blocks you.

8ePlans for present-use value

A forest management plan is what qualifies a landowner's woods for the present-use value tax rate. The county will read it against a short list, and audit it later. The app produces one that meets the list.

In North Carolina, forestland is taxed on what it earns growing trees rather than what it would sell for, if the owner has at least 20 acres in actual production under a written sound forest management plan and files it with the county (G.S. 105-277.3). There is no income test for forestland. The tax difference is large, so a plan that qualifies is a product with a market of every landowner with twenty wooded acres — and it is also a contract: the signed application and the plan together are an agreement with the county tax office, and the plan must be followed.

The five things the plan must contain

The Department of Revenue's Present-Use Value Program Guide (August 2023, chapter 5) lists them, and every county assessor is bound to that guide. Where each one lives in the app:

Set For present-use value to Yes and the plan opens with the sentence the assessor is reading for: that it is prepared to qualify the land under G.S. 105-277.3, with commercial timber production as its primary objective. The sign-off carries the same statement above the signatures.

What the county does with it

• It is filed with the application (form AV-5) and must be in compliance as of January 1 of the year claimed. The application window is the January listing period, or 60 days after a transfer.
• One eighth of all present-use parcels are reviewed every year, so every property is audited about once in eight years (G.S. 105-296(j)). The assessor may ask for the plan and for proof that practices whose dates have passed were carried out. The owner has 60 days to produce them; silence loses the classification.
• Harvest dates are a guide, not a deadline. The Department of Revenue told assessors in 2013 to allow a window of three to five years around a scheduled harvest. Further than that, amend the plan.
• Losing the classification is expensive. The deferred tax for the current year and the three before it comes due at once, with interest as though it had always been owed (G.S. 105-277.4(c)). Failing to report a disqualifying change adds 10% per listing period.

Who may write and sign it

The statute asks only for a written plan. The guide says a consulting forester, a Forest Service forester, or the owner may prepare it — an owner-written plan is held to the same standard, not a lower one. But North Carolina licenses the word: nobody may sign as a forester, registered forester or consulting forester without being registered under Chapter 89B, and a consulting forester files an affidavit with the Board every June. Sign with your registration number; the sign-off block prints it.

Sources: N.C.G.S. §§ 105-277.2 to 105-277.7, 105-296(j), Chapter 89B; 21 NCAC 20; NCDOR Present-Use Value Program Guide, August 2023 edition, chapter 5; form AV-5 (rev. 3-18); NCDOR memorandum to assessors of 12 March 2013. Read directly, September 2026.

9Working with no signal

Most of a forester's day happens where there are no bars. The app assumes that rather than apologising for it.

What actually works

How it works, briefly

Worth understanding, because it explains what to expect:

• The app itself is stored on the phone. The first time you open it, everything needed to run is downloaded and kept. After that it opens with no connection at all.
• Drafts are stored on the phone, not on a server. Whatever you type is on your device within a second of typing it.
• The stand table is calculated on the phone. The maths runs locally, not on a server, which is why you get basal area and sampling error standing on the plot.
• Finished reports queue. Complete an activity with no signal and it goes into an outbox instead of being sent.

The queue

When something's waiting, a banner across the top tells you how many. You don't have to do anything — the moment the phone gets a connection the queue empties itself and the reports appear in History.

If you're impatient, the banner has a Send now button.

What to expect on a typical day

1. Before you leave — open the app once in range

   Gives it a chance to pick up any changes and confirm it's ready. Ten seconds in the truck.

2. On the tract — work exactly as normal

   Fill forms, tally plots, take photos, get signatures. If you tapped before losing signal, the weather is already in. If not, fill those few fields by hand.

3. Complete reports as you finish them

   Don't wait until you're back in range. Complete each one on the tract — it queues, and completing it while the details are fresh is the whole point.

4. Back in range — check the banner clears

   It sends by itself. Glance at History to confirm the dots went green.

10Settings

Set up once, then mostly left alone.

Everything is filed under a heading you can fold shut, so you're not scrolling past the labour rates to find the passcode:

Company & logo

The name, tagline, address, phone and website printed at the top of every report. Set here once rather than typed onto each one.

Under those is Logo. Tap Choose an image and pick it from the phone — it's shrunk to a sensible size for you, so a photo straight off a camera is fine. It then prints at the top of every report, proposal and invoice. Remove puts back the drawn conifer the app ships with.

Either way, tap Save — choosing an image doesn't keep it on its own.

Email delivery

The address reports are sent from, and its app password. Tap Save & test connection — it saves first, then checks it actually works, and tells you plainly if it doesn't.

Access

The team passcode. Changing it signs every device out, so everyone will need the new one.

Volume calibration

Where cruise volume estimates get checked against reality. After a sale closes, record what the cruise predicted and what the mill actually took. After three sales the app tells you whether the estimate is running high or low, and offers to correct it.

Reports you've already sent never change when you do this — they keep the figures they were calculated with. Only new work reflects the correction.

Demo

Load sample reports builds one complete example of every report type, for showing a landowner what they'd receive.

Every page is watermarked SAMPLE. One tap removes them all, and removing them never touches real reports.

11If something goes wrong

Say so, from where it happened

The light bulb beside the calculator, at the top of every screen, takes a note about the app itself — something that is wrong, or something that would be better. Write it there and then; it is far easier to describe a problem while looking at it than to remember it that evening.

The note carries the screen you were on when you tapped the bulb — the activity, the section, the box you were in — and the sheet tells you exactly what it is about to send, with that part of the screen outlined behind it. Nothing else goes with it.

With no signal the note waits in the same outbox the reports use and goes when you are back in range. Notes are read under Settings → Ideas and problems, newest first, and cleared with the × once they are dealt with.

Anything not covered here — the draft is saved, so nothing you've typed is at risk while you sort it out.

▪Quick reference

The whole app on one page. Worth printing for the truck.