Snow plowing log: every property, every push, with no internet

Last updated 4 November 2026.

Short answer: keep one list of properties and one list of visits, one row each time a truck plows or salts a lot. At the end of the month, filter to the month and group by property, and each account's visits sit together with the count in the heading. It works on a laptop with no internet. If your drivers need to type on a phone in the cab, read where this is honest first.

On PlowSite, a contractor described the system most small outfits still run: a composition book in each truck, where each driver writes what they did at each location and how many times. Fine until invoicing, when it means going through every book. In their words: “I DREAD the end of the month, except for the money.” (The thread, from 2008, read 4 November 2026.) Other contractors there keep a binder per truck with time in, time out, lot conditions and deicer used, then type it into Excel the next day.

So the job is not tracking trucks. It is answering two questions without a pile of notebooks: how many times was each lot plowed and salted this month, and what exactly happened at that lot on the night someone says they slipped.

How the lists fit together

Open a property and every visit is listed under it, so the night in question is one click away. Open the visits list, pick last month and group by property, and the count beside each name is the number of pushes to bill.

A log that lives on the laptop

Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “keep my plow accounts and each plow or salt visit with time in, time out and deicer used”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:

• Type up the night's book at the shop or the kitchen table, one row per stop.
• Attach a photo of the cleared lot or of the driver's page (files on records).
• Print a property's history for a property manager or an insurer (how printing works).
• Search and sort: every salt run at one lot this season, every visit by one truck, every stop where the notes say “icy”.

When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, so the office computer sees the same records. Every change is kept with who made it and when, so a visit typed in the next morning cannot be quietly edited later without it showing (how history works).

Getting old records in

If last season is already in a spreadsheet, drop it on our home page. Each sheet comes in as its own list, so one sheet of properties and one of visits, with the property name on each visit row, is the easiest shape. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app; forty lots pushed thirty times is 1,200.

Where this is honest

• No offline phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only. On a phone, ours runs in the browser and needs a signal, so a driver on a back road with no bars keeps the notebook, or the truck carries a laptop.
• No GPS or automatic times. Time in and time out are what someone types. Nothing reads the truck's position.
• It does not send invoices. It gives you the count and the history for each account. The invoice still comes from QuickBooks or whatever you use now, and you can download any list as a spreadsheet.
• 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.