One question in, one tap out

The app asks whether you want a template or not, and nothing is created until you answer — back out and there is no half-made site on your list. There is still no panel and no name box.

Start from a template opens the shapes on this device. Each is described by what it asks and what it hands over, because a name alone is not enough to tell two of your own shapes apart six months later.

Take Just start and you land on the site's own page, able to photograph something before you have decided what the building is called. It is named New building for now, and the app offers you the rename later, at the one moment the name starts to matter — when a report is about to print it.

The first time you ever do this, a message appears at the top of the screen. It is worth reading once, because it is the app's whole position on location.

The strip pinned under the header is one segment per card, in the order the page runs. Each segment is a tap target: tapping it takes you to that card. It never blocks anything — an outstanding requirement shows as an amber number, not a lock.

Give a site a template that asks questions and the same strip starts carrying real numbers. A set of questions shows answered / asked and fills its bar to match; an item checklist shows what you have recorded.

Two buttons float in the bottom-right corner of every site page: Photo and Note. They are there wherever you have scrolled to, and they are the fastest way in — you do not need to find the right card first.

The composer is a box for what you saw, a place to say where, and buttons to attach a photograph. Underneath the buttons is the sentence that explains the whole app's save model.

Photos taken from the floating button, or from the Site photos card, land in the site's own gallery. Each one gets a number, a date, and three things you can do to it.

Cover page & site details → Open. Two boxes: the site name and the address. They are what identifies the site on screen, in every exported file's name, and on the front of the report.

Below the cover boxes is Site details — questions asked once about this site. A template that asks nothing about the site says so plainly rather than showing an empty box.

Four ways into a measured sheet, and you pick whichever one the building gave you.

Set up at the top of the site page opens this site's own copy of its template. Five tabs — Template · What you ask · Arrange · What you hand over · Levels — and everything in them belongs to this site alone. The middle three are the template editor's own stages (Part 2), wearing the same names.

This is also the easiest way to make your first template. Set one site up until it is right, then use Save as a template at the foot of the Template tab. It saves structure only — no answers, no photos, no site name — and it is far less abstract than building one from an empty page.

An item checklist is the same questions asked of every door, room or unit, in reference order — on the printed report the section is headed “register”, which is the paper's word for it. It arrives with a template that has one, or you add one from Set up → What you ask → Add a section → Asked of every item — and a site can hold as many checklists as the work needs.

A template can ask to be walked rather than scrolled. When it does, the progress strip grows a text button on its right: Guide me. Tap it and the page shows one card, with Back and Next and a Step 3 of 7 line between them.

At the foot of the page is Declaration & sign-off. Type who is signing, sign in the box with a finger or a stylus, and the app stamps the moment. The report prints all three — the signature, the name and the time — instead of the ruled blank line it prints when nothing has been signed.

The signer does not have to be you. The name is typed at signing rather than read from your account, because the tablet gets handed to a building manager or a client's representative, and their signature should not arrive under your name.

Finish, top right of the site page, opens a small card rather than leaving. It describes itself accurately: “Saves the report (PDF) and hands it to you to share, and quietly backs this site up in the same act.”

The glance above the buttons

The amber list is a pre-flight glance: facts read off measures the page already has, listed only when they are not zero. A clean site gets no list at all — not a list of noughts. There are four possible lines:

• N required questions unanswered — the same count the progress meter's amber numbers add up to.
• N of M expected checklist items not recorded — only when somebody authored an expected total. No total, no line.
• N sheets uncalibrated — a sheet built on an image that was never given a scale.
• N photos cannot be read and will be left out of the report — checked before the report is built, not after.

What that one tap actually writes

The report (PDF) is the thing you hand over. Beside it, in the same act, the app writes a .coreproof backup of the whole site to your downloads — sheets, scale, photos, notes, answers. If that backup cannot be written the report still stands, and the card says so in one line rather than throwing the finish away.

On a Pro licence there is a third file: the survey package, a zip of the photos and the plans. If it fails, the report and the backup are unaffected — the card tells you and nothing is lost. On Free the card carries one quiet line instead: “The full package (photos + plans) is a Pro export.”

Second stop on the left rail.

Three sections down this screen:

• Your templates — the shelf. Each card has Edit, Duplicate, Rename, Export and Delete.
• From a file — import a .coreproof-template somebody sent you. Free on every tier.
• Note types — the labels a note can carry. Either each template brings its own, or you keep one list for the whole device.

New template opens a three-step wizard, in a panel above the shelf. The first step is only a name.

Eleven ready-made sections, each a tappable card, grouped the way a real visit runs: Getting there, Doing the work, Wrapping up. Pick any number of them, or none. Nothing is pre-selected, because picking is the step.

Read the grey chip on each card

It is the single most consequential thing on this screen, and it decides the mechanism rather than the wording.

The last card, I'll write my own, takes nothing and skips straight to step 3. It is the empty start, offered out loud rather than implied by picking nothing. And once you have saved sections of your own (step 12 below), they appear here too, under My sections, wearing a Saved by you chip.

A short checklist of the PDF's sections, one row per thing you picked, all ticked to begin with.

Two columns: you build on the left, and the right-hand Preview shows what a site made from this template will look like. It follows every keystroke. Across the top sits the editor's spine — 1 · Name it · 2 · What you ask · 3 · Arrange · 4 · What you hand over — and the numbers are the order the work reads in, not a gate: move freely, in any order.

Everything this template asks lives in one list on the What-you-ask stage: your sections, any item checklists, and two fixed rows that are always there — Site details (the building's own facts, asked once, printed under the cover) and Note questions (asked under the words of every note somebody writes). Each row opens with its own Edit; one row is open at a time.

Add a section sits at the foot of the list, and the row it opens asks one question before it asks for a name.

Below your own rows sits Ready-made sections (11) — the same eleven from the wizard, each with a plain Add button — and, once you have saved any, My sections, your own shelf (step 12). The disclosure opens itself while a template has no sections and folds away once it has one.

Type the question, then say how it is answered. The answer types are four families — Words · Choice · Number · Photo / Date — and a family that could mean two things opens a second row of chips underneath to pick the exact one.

Edit on a question's row opens its panel. On a Pass / Fail question, one button does the thing most people want — “On a bad answer, ask for a photo and what's wrong” — two follow-up questions, shown only when a failing answer is given. Everything deeper sits behind More settings: a helper line for whoever is on site, a Required toggle, which answers count as good or bad, and Only ask this when… — a condition that keeps the question out of the way until a particular answer is given.

The pane on the right has three buttons of its own — On site, The report, Outputs — and they work from whichever stage you happen to be authoring in. Adding a question in What you ask and wanting to see what it did to the report does not mean walking to Arrange and back.

Writing a section and placing it are two different jobs. The Arrange stage is one list of everything this template holds, and each row carries two pills: On site — does this card appear on the page — and In the report — does this section print. Move up and move down set both orders at once.

The fourth stage decides what Finish writes on a site made from this template. Each deliverable has a row with a tick — the report, the photo pack, the floor plan pack, the site's notes, and the materials schedule — and More settings on a row folds out its detail, including a file-name box that takes tokens like {site} and {date}. Under the rows, two switches say what prints beneath each photograph in the report: the GPS coordinates and the time & date.

The photo pack has two sizes, and they are independent. Resized for handover caps each photo at 2,560 px — small enough to email — and Full resolution hands over the originals. Tick both and the package carries both, in folders that name them.

The materials schedule is off unless you tick it. A site that declares it grows a card reading everything on its drawings back — every block, opening and wall counted, split into Existing, Proposed and Demolition — which you can correct on site before it goes out. It hands over as a CSV, because a take-off is something you open in a spreadsheet.

The same questions asked of every door, room or unit, each answer set wearing its own reference — that is an item checklist. (On the printed report the section is headed “register”, which is the paper's word for the same thing.) It is made from the same Add a section door: answer Asked of every item and the checklist appears in the list, with its own row open and one question to answer first.

Under the noun, Asked of every door is the same question builder a section uses. A template can hold as many checklists as the work needs — doors and fire dampers each get their own — and each numbers its own series. How many items are expected is deliberately not here: that is a count somebody takes in a particular building, so it lives on the checklist card's own Set up on the site, not in the shape.

At the foot of the What-you-ask stage sits Labels: what notes and photos can be tagged as. Note types group the notes in the report; photo categories colour a photo's pin on the plan.

Try it, top right beside Done, opens a rehearsal: a real site made from this template — the same cards, the same report — that is nobody's work.

A rehearsal appears on no list and spends nothing against the Free plan's site cap. End rehearsal removes it and puts you back in the editor; close the app mid-rehearsal and it is swept away on the next start. Nothing a rehearsal touches can become anyone's work.

There is nothing to save. Done takes you back to the shelf, where your template is now waiting in every site's Set up from here on.

Every symbol the app can draw, each at its real proportions with its real size in millimetres. There is a search box across the top and a row of categories under it. This screen is readable with no site open — it is a reference, and finding out what exists should not require starting a survey.

New block opens a drawing surface. Give it a name, set how big it is in millimetres, pick a category, and draw with the two tools: Box and Line. Drag on the square; everything snaps to 25 mm, so the numbers you read back are the numbers you meant.

Save it and it lands on My blocks, with its own symbol, its size and the shelf you filed it on. The pencil on a row opens the same editor again — a block you saved months ago can be corrected rather than deleted and redrawn.