Trip planning

Some surveys visit the same fixed set of stations every season: a grid of sampling points laid out across a coastline, a lake, or a management area. Trip planning is for those. You choose which stations to visit and in what order on a map, CensusIO works out how many field days and how far it is, and the plan syncs to your field devices so a crew carries the route and collects at each station, offline.

The whole flow

Add your stations in Locations. A station is a site (or waterbody) in your Locations tree that has coordinates. The trip planner uses your real locations, so this is where you set their names and coordinates, once.
Plan a trip. Open Trips in the top navigation and start a new trip. On the map you pick the stations to visit, in the order you will work them. The route draws as you go, each leg labelled with its distance, and Optimize order can reorder your picks nearest-first from the start point.
Add logistics (optional). On the Logistics step you can record the trip’s crew, its departure and delivery ports, provisions like bait and ice loaded and a projected landing, and a projected day-by-day schedule: each day’s expected activity (sampling, running, offloading, a weather day, a repair, or in port). All of it is optional; a route-only trip skips this step.
Review the estimate and save. CensusIO estimates the field days, the total days (adding any buffer for weather and transit), the distance, and the station count. Save the trip and it opens on a map you can come back to any time, with the logistics and the projected schedule shown alongside the route.
Sync to your devices. The saved trip travels in the same download your devices already do for forms. Connect the desktop or mobile app, and the plan (and your stations) land on the device, cached so they work with no signal afterward.
Collect on the trip. On the device, the crew opens the trip and taps Collect on this trip. Every record they capture is linked to the trip, and a station picker in the form shows the trip’s own stations, numbered in the planned visiting order; other stations stay one search away. The plan itself stays read-only on the device; it is made at HQ.
Watch the progress. Back on the web, the trip page turns into a coverage board: each planned station shows a green check with its record count once data lands there, or reads pending. One glance answers “which stations are done, which are left”.

A worked example

A coastal team runs a setline survey on a 10 by 10 nautical mile grid. Their Locations tree has 24 station sites along the shelf, each with a latitude and longitude. For the first leg of the season they plan a trip that visits the eight nearest stations out of their home port, in a loop that keeps the daily runs short:

CensusIO reports the trip as, say, 8 stations, 2 field days, 3 total days, 96 km. The team saves it, syncs the vessel’s desktop app before leaving the dock, presses Collect on this trip, and works the eight stations offline. When they are back in range and sync, their records flow into CensusIO already linked to the trip, the trip page shows all eight stations checked off with their record counts, and review proceeds like any other.

Building the route

The route is an ordered list of which stations to visit, not free-form GPS destinations. After you set an optional start point (your port or base), you tap the next station on the map, then the next; CensusIO draws the connecting leg and shows its distance. You can reorder or remove stations, and Optimize order runs a nearest-neighbour pass from the start to cut travel time, which you can still adjust by hand.

On your devices, offline

A saved trip is not frozen: open it and press Edit to change the stations, route, defaults, or logistics in the same wizard. Every change is recorded in the trip’s change history on its page, so you can see who edited the plan, when, and exactly what changed.

Plans are made at HQ on the web, then synced down to the field. Open the desktop app’s Plan section (or the Navigator) and the mobile app’s Plan a trip to see the trips the device carries, each with its route and station order. Because the plan and the stations are cached on sync, the field crew keeps them with no connection. Editing a trip happens back at HQ on the web; the device view is read-only.

The Trip field: how records join a trip

The trip lives in the form itself: a Trip field type, added in the survey builder exactly like the Station field. Add it only to survey types that are worked on trips (a vessel catch log, a multi-day station circuit), and mark it required if a record must never be saved without one; a survey type without the field simply has nothing to do with trips. The Vessel Trip (Catch Log) starter includes it.

Collecting works the same everywhere: pick the trip in the form (web entry, rapid entry, offline browser collect, desktop, mobile), and the record links to it. Two conveniences ride along:

Pre-fill: on a device, opening a synced trip and tapping Collect on this trip pre-fills the Trip field on every new record (a banner shows the active trip, with a Leave trip action).
Live station filtering: with a trip chosen in the form, a station picker in the same form narrows to that trip’s stations, numbered in the planned visiting order. Change the trip and the stations re-filter.

Records collected on a trip show it in a Trip column on the records page, and each planned station on the trip page shows how many records it has; together they turn the plan into a live progress board.

Plan and availability

Trip planning is included on the Professional plan and above. It is visible to every organization so you can see how it works; below Professional the Trips page shows an upgrade prompt, and devices show a short note in place of the planner. An organization owner can upgrade in Billing, then sync a device to enable it.