Maple syrup records: taps, sap runs and boils, with no internet

Last updated 3 November 2026.

Short answer: keep one list of trees, one of sap runs and one of boils. Write down the sap that went in and the syrup that came out each time you boil, and the season totals add themselves up. It works on a laptop in the sugarhouse with no internet. If you want it on a phone out in the bush with no signal, read where this is honest first.

On the Permies forum a backyard sugarer with eight taps said “my record keeping was non-existent on this project” and “i did not keep track of the ratio.” The reply came from someone with 15 trees and 30 taps, whose sap-to-syrup ratio had ranged from 34:1 in a bad year to 24:1 in a good one, and who had kept records since a single tap: “Some day I will have to go back into my records and add up all the production numbers.” (The thread, read 3 November 2026.)

That is the whole job in two posts. One person wishes they had written things down. The other wrote everything down and still has to add it up by hand.

How the lists fit together

Group the boils by season and the table shows each season's syrup on its own line, with a total under the column. That is the “add up all the production numbers” job, done every time you open the list. Open a tree and you see every run you logged from it.

A log that lives on the laptop

Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “keep my maple trees, sap collections and boils, with sap in and syrup out per boil”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:

• Log a boil at the evaporator, while you still remember the numbers.
• Attach a photo of the grade card or the tree (files on records).
• Print a season as a page for the wall or the tax pile (how printing works).
• Search and sort: every boil in 2024, every run from the red maples, the best ratio you ever had.

When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, so a second computer in the house sees the same log.

Getting old records in

If your years are already in a spreadsheet, drop it on our home page. Each sheet comes in as its own list, so if you keep a sheet per year and want the years side by side, put them on one sheet with a season column first. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app, which is a lot of boils.

Where this is honest

• No formulas. The ratio is not worked out by a formula in the cell. You type it, or set up a workflow that divides sap in by syrup out when you save a boil.
• No offline phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only. On a phone, ours runs in the browser and needs a signal.
• No weather feed and no sap-run forecast. Weather is whatever you write down.
• Set it up while you have a connection. The AI that builds the app runs on our server. Using it afterwards does not need one.
• We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.