A boat maintenance log that works with no internet

Last updated 3 November 2026.

Short answer: keep the log on the laptop aboard, not on a website. Then it works at anchor and catches up when you reach marina wifi.

On a trawler owners’ forum, an owner asked: “Can anyone recommend an iPad app or a windows based program suitable for a owner run and maintained MY?” Their wish list was a captain’s log, fuel cost and use, maintenance scheduling and costs, parts inventory, vendor contacts, electronic manuals and maintenance pictures. They were keeping a paper logbook aboard and three ring binders at home.

The first reply described what many owners end up with: every manual on a small laptop carried aboard, and an Excel workbook with one sheet for every job done (date, description, system, hour meter, cost) and another for when each item is next due. (Both read on 3 November 2026.)

That workbook is a database already. It just cannot hold the photos, and the manuals live in a different folder from the jobs they explain.

Why a web app is the wrong home for it

• The boat is offline exactly when the work happens: at anchor, on a mooring, in the engine room.
• A page that was open can still fail the moment you search or save, because each save goes to a server.
• Photos of a part are taken where the part is, not later at home.

A log that lives on the laptop

Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “a boat log with maintenance jobs, fuel fills, parts and vendors”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:

• Add a job with the date, hour meter reading, cost and system.
• Attach the photo and the manual to the record it belongs to, so the PDF for the generator sits on the generator.
• Link records together: a job to the part it used, a part to the vendor who sells it. Open the vendor and see everything bought from them.
• Sort and total: fuel by month, cost by system, items by next due date.

When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, and a second computer at home sees the same log.

Getting your log in

If you already keep it in Excel, drop the .xlsx on our home page. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app.

If yours has a jobs sheet and a next-due sheet, as the forum reply did, you will be asked which sheet to start with. Bring the other one in afterwards with Import inside the app; each sheet becomes its own list.

Where this is honest

• No formulas. A cell that works out the next due hours will come in as a plain value. Type the next due date or hours on each item and sort by it.
• No iPad or phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only; in a browser, ours needs a connection too.
• Set it up before you cast off. The AI that builds the app runs on our server, so that part needs a connection. Using it afterwards does not.
• We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.