Vessel Inspections

Overview

SeaSquad's inspection app lets a vessel's crew complete structured inspections on board — safety walkthroughs, monthly technical checks, security checks, and environmental checks — using a phone or tablet. The app is built to work at sea, where a reliable internet connection cannot be assumed. Every inspection can be started, filled in, and completed without connectivity, then syncs to shore automatically once a connection is available.

Shore-side staff review completed inspections in the web portal, track fleet-wide inspection status, and see defects as they're raised.

Completing an inspection on board

An inspector opens the app, selects the vessel and the inspection type, and starts a new inspection from the assigned template. Templates are organized into areas (for example, engine room, bridge, deck) and categories within each area. For each category, the inspector records one of three outcomes:

• OK — the category passes with no issues. The inspector can optionally attach a positive observation: remarks, photos, or a voice note.
• Defect — an issue is logged against the category, with a criticality level (critical, major, or minor), a description, and supporting photos or a voice recording.
• Not applicable — the category doesn't apply to this vessel or this inspection. A category can only be marked not applicable if it has no open defects or observations recorded against it.

Categories and whole areas can be marked not applicable in bulk, and any of these states can be undone if the inspector needs to revisit an entry. The app tracks overall progress — categories inspected, defects by criticality, percentage complete — so the inspector always knows what's left.

Inspections also capture context: port, weather conditions, sea state, and the names of the master and chief engineer at the time of inspection.

Working offline

The app is designed offline-first: starting, filling in, and completing an inspection never requires a live connection. Every action — marking a category OK, logging a defect, attaching a photo — is written to the device immediately and queued for sync. When the device reconnects, queued changes are sent to the server in the correct order, so an inspection created offline is fully reconstructed on shore exactly as the inspector left it, including all defects, observations, and attachments.

If a sync is interrupted, it resumes without duplicating work. The app also prevents an inspector from starting a duplicate inspection for a vessel and template that already has one in progress, whether that in-progress inspection lives only on the device or has already reached the server.

Shore-side review

Once an inspection is submitted, it moves into a review state in the portal. A reviewer works through the inspection's areas and categories, sees every defect with its criticality, photos, and notes, and can approve the inspection or reject it back to the vessel with a reason. Approved and rejected inspections carry a record of who reviewed them and when.

The portal also maintains a living fleet inspection status view: for every active vessel, it shows the most recent completed inspection, when the next one is due, and who's assigned. Due dates are calculated automatically from each vessel's inspection history and age, and shore staff can override individual fields — for example, to correct a planned date or note a different inspector — without losing the underlying live data, which stays available to revert to.

What the mobile app doesn't do

The inspection app is scoped to vessel inspections. It doesn't include email, chat, or other AI features — those live in the web portal and the Outlook add-in. This keeps the on-board app lightweight and reliable for its one job: capturing accurate inspection data at sea, with or without a connection.