How to Automate Carlson Software

Carlson Survey is where the fieldwork becomes a drawing

Carlson Software makes the CAD, data collection and machine control software that land surveyors, civil engineers and construction crews work in. The office side is Carlson Survey, a Windows CAD application built specifically for surveyors, running on AutoCAD or on the IntelliCAD engine that ships with it. The field side is SurvCE on a data collector and SurvPC on a tablet, driving RTK GPS receivers, total stations and robotic instruments.

Between them sits the thing the firm is actually paid for. A crew spends a day on a boundary, a topo or a construction stake-out and comes back with coded points. Those points become linework, symbols and contours, then a plat, an ALTA survey, a site plan or a set of grading sheets with somebody's seal on it.

For a small survey firm, that chain is the entire product. Everything else is overhead.

Every job carries a second job made of documents

The overhead is substantial, and almost none of it happens in CAD.

A request comes in by email or a web form and somebody types it into a job list. Before a crew goes out, somebody pulls the deed and the recorded plat from a county recorder's site, checks the tax parcel record, and files an 811 locate ticket so the utilities get marked. While the job runs, somebody watches whether the locate responses came back. Afterwards the plat goes to a county or municipal review portal, and its status changes there quietly, when it changes.

Then the firm's own paperwork. An invoice sent and not paid. A client who owes a signed contract before fieldwork can be scheduled. A surveyor's licence renewal in one state and a continuing education requirement in another. A crew that needs confirming for Tuesday.

None of it is surveying, and all of it lands on whoever answers the phone.

Carlson Software

Research done before the crew is booked The deed and the recorded plat pulled from the county recorder's site, so a job is scheduled with the record already in the file.

Locate tickets followed to every response The 811 ticket watched until each utility has answered, with the outstanding ones listed by name instead of remembered.

Licences checked against the state board Every surveyor's licence and continuing education status read off the board's own register, weeks before an expiry rather than after one.

Field to Finish automates the drawing, not the deed research

The production automation in Carlson is genuinely good, and a firm should be using all of it before looking anywhere else.

Field to Finish is the centrepiece. Code the points in SurvCE or SurvPC, and Carlson Survey draws them in the office with the layer, symbol, size and linetype the code specifies, so linework arrives with the points rather than after them. SurvPC adds GNSS averaging, least squares adjustment in the field and Esri integration, which means an error gets caught while the crew is still standing on the job. The Civil Suite bundles Carlson Survey with Carlson Civil, Carlson Hydrology and Carlson GIS so the same data carries through design, with dwg, dgn and LandXML for the deliverable. Carlson Takeoff and Carlson Point Cloud handle the earthwork and scan side.

That is a lot of automation, and it all points one way: from the field into the drawing.

None of it looks outward. Carlson has no idea whether the county approved the plat, whether the locate ticket came back, or whether the invoice for the last job was ever paid, because none of those live in a drawing.

A survey job can track the approvals it waits on

Every approval a survey job needs is posted by the county, the state board or the utility that issued it.

The county recorder checked for the deed and the recorded plat before the crew is scheduled, so the research is done rather than pending. The tax parcel record read for an ownership change between the quote and the fieldwork, so the plat carries the right name. The 811 locate ticket followed until every utility has responded, with the outstanding ones listed by name instead of remembered. The plat review portal read each morning, so a reviewer's comment is a note against the job that day rather than a discovery three weeks on.

The firm's own money and licences work the same way. A request from the website read the day it lands and written into the job list with the parcel attached, so the first call is about scheduling. Unpaid invoices gathered into one chase list, oldest first, with the job and the client on each line. Every surveyor's licence and continuing education status checked against the state board's own register, weeks before an expiry rather than after one.

Each of those is a person, a login and a copy, and not one of them needs a CAD seat.

Somebody opens the county portal either way

That research is going to get done. The only variable is whether it happens at seven in the morning or a party chief remembers it at four.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the recorder's site, the locate system, the review portal, the state board's register or the client's document portal, reads what is on the screen the way your office manager does, and puts the answer against the job: a status, a chase list, a date that moved.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, limited to the sites you allow. You can watch a run and stop it, and anything that reaches a client stays a draft until you have read it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.