What to ask of your surveyors
What it is for
Your surveys are processed automatically as they arrive in the Stonal Smartdoc document library: they are filed, and the information they contain is extracted from them.
How well that works depends a great deal on how the documents were produced. So the recommendations below are for your surveying contractors, ideally written into the specifications of your contracts.
A survey that does not follow them will still be handled. These recommendations exist to greatly simplify the transmission of your surveys and to make the information they hold more usable.
1. Send surveys through the API
This is the recommendation that pays off most. Ask your surveyors to use our document API to upload their surveys automatically.
What you gain:
- direct, immediate integration, with no manual transmission — so nothing forgotten, no wrong recipient, no delay;
- compliance analyses that are always up to date, since the survey arrives as soon as it is produced.
The API is available and documented: Upload a file.
2. Use the Stonal building codes
Ask your surveyors to use your portfolio's codes as they exist in Stonal to identify what they survey: buildings, units, premises.
Without them, what a document attaches to has to be guessed. With them, it is certain.
Surveyors can query our base directly to retrieve those codes without asking you: see Searching data in the API Guide.
3. Have the metadata sent too
Our artificial intelligence automatically extracts the key information from a survey — visit date, validity, rating, result. But a poor-quality document, or an unsuitable format, limits how precise that extraction can be.
Where possible, have that information sent directly through the API. The error rate then drops to zero, because there is nothing left to interpret.
4. Where the API is not an option: produce readable documents
These practices markedly improve extraction accuracy:
| Good practice | Why |
|---|---|
| Native PDFs, not scans | Avoids character-recognition errors |
| One survey per file, with no cover page | A PDF bundling several surveys is hard to split |
| If scanning cannot be avoided, scan well | Good resolution, straight page, decent contrast, no rotation; avoid coloured text |
| Explicit plain-text statements for key information | Information that is readable is information that can be extracted |
| No tick boxes, and nothing that appears only in an image or a watermark | Those are not text, even in a native PDF |
| A consistent document structure across contractors | Fewer errors, simpler processing |
| The property and unit code in the file name and in the document | That is what attaches the document to the right place |
Our artificial intelligence handles them well. For information that only exists in a technical diagram or on a plan — a location, for instance — a written description remains far more reliable.
See also
- The documents of a property — what happens to a survey once uploaded
- The Compliance report — what these surveys feed
- API Guide — Upload a file