Sending a report to your assessor, start to finish

Sending happens from the plot page with the Send Report/Photos button. One send delivers three things: a PDF report, a ZIP archive of the plot's photos, and — for assessors registered on the free portal — an in-portal copy of both. Here is the complete flow.

Before you start

• Add the recipient once, under Assessors. Open the side menu → Assessors → add your assessor's name and email address. The send flow picks from this list; if it is empty the app will tell you to add someone first. The recipient does not have to be a SAP assessor — any report recipient works.
• Get a connection. Sending uploads the report and photos, so it needs internet. Offline, the button is disabled and reads "Send Report/Photos (Offline)". Capturing photos does not need signal — only sending does.
• A working email app must be set up on the phone (Mail, Gmail, Outlook and so on), because the final step composes a real email from your own address. On an iPhone with more than one, the app asks which to use ("Send the report with…") and says what happens next.

The steps

1. Open the project, then the plot, and check the section list. Each of the six evidence sections shows "Complete" or "Incomplete" with a count, and the bar at the bottom summarises progress (the Appendix does not count towards completion). You can send at any point — the app does not force completeness — but an incomplete report is usually a conversation with your assessor first.
2. Tap Send Report/Photos at the bottom of the plot page.
3. In the picker that opens, select the assessor and tap Send Report/Photos.
4. If any of the plot's photos cannot be found on the device, a warning tells you how many are missing and asks whether to continue — see the missing-photos-warning article. Nothing is generated or uploaded until you confirm. If a photo has no location, the send stops and names its item: add the location from the photo's details, then send again. If the plot's report went to a different assessor, the app asks "Replace the report sent to [name]?": confirming hands the report over and the first assessor loses access to it at once; Cancel sends nothing.
5. What you should see, in order:

• "Generating PDF report..." while the app builds the PDF (cover page, statement of purpose, a photo-locations map, the six evidence sections with each photo's coordinates and date, and any appendix PDFs merged at the end).
• "Uploading photos. This may take some time." while the photo archive is zipped and uploaded. A photo-heavy plot on a slow connection genuinely can take a while — keep the app open.
• Your email app opens with a pre-addressed message, any project managers copied in. It holds one link, to the report's page, and nothing is attached. (Versions before 2.1, or a 2.1 send when the link can't be made, attach the PDF instead, with a download link for the photos that works for 7 days from the send.)

1. Press send in the email app. This is the step people miss — the app cannot send the email for you; it hands you the message so it comes from your own address.
2. Afterwards, the report appears in the app's Reports section labelled "Sent to [assessor]", and the plot's PDF is saved on the device under Documents/BuildSnpper/Reports.

What the assessor receives

• Email, from version 2.1: one link, to the report's page. The page asks for the email address the report was sent to — the assessor's, or a project manager's — then opens the PDF and downloads the photo ZIP, a fresh download on every click. The link has no expiry date: it works while the report is current, opens the new version when you send the plot to the same assessor again, and stops working if you send the plot to a different assessor or delete the report. Anyone else who gets hold of the email cannot open it with their own address. See opening a report from its email link for what the assessor sees.
• Emails from versions before 2.1 carry the report PDF attached, plus a link to download the photo ZIP that works for 7 days from the send (each click issues a fresh, short-lived download), then retires.
• Portal (registered assessors): the report and the photo archive appear in their free Buildsnapper portal account whether or not the email arrives, and the portal copy is not on any timer — it stays available for as long as your report and your account exist, and the portal checks their access afresh every time they download. (Long-term custody independent of your account is what the assessor's paid Photo Evidence Archive is for.) For a registered assessor the email is effectively a notification; the delivery already happened when the upload finished.

If something goes wrong mid-send

The app is honest at every step, and the order of operations protects earlier sends — a failed attempt never destroys a previously sent archive:

• "Unable to create the report. It has NOT been sent" — generation failed before anything was uploaded. Try again; see report-generation-failed.
• "Report saved, photos not sent" — the PDF was stored but the photo archive upload failed; the previously sent archive (if any) is untouched. Try again, or re-send from the Reports page.
• "Report saved, email not sent" or "No email app available" — the report and photos are already stored (a registered assessor can see them in the portal); only the email needs re-doing, from the Reports page once email is working. If the phone genuinely has no email app, install one (Mail is built into iPhone; Gmail or Outlook on either platform), sign into your email address in it, and — if the phone asks — set it as the default email app. Then resend from the Reports page.
• Cancelling the email in Apple Mail on an iPhone counts as not sent, and the app says so rather than pretending it went. With any other mail app, and on Android, the app can't see whether you pressed send, so check that app's Sent folder.