GeoBoard, by SaasQuirk

From the field survey of a hoarding to a taxed, auditable record

GeoBoard is an advertisement tax system for municipal corporations. It takes every hoarding and shop board in a city from the surveyor's form to a permanent record with the right fee on it, on the city's own ward map and the city's own rate schedule.

Talk to us about GeoBoard

Every board in the city takes the same six steps, from the surveyor's phone to a taxed record the department can defend.

The workflow, from the surveyor's phone to the register

Six steps, the same for every board in the city.

Survey

Every board recorded in the field

The department defines its own survey fields without code, including the photos and video each board needs. Surveyors save drafts on site and submit them one at a time or in bulk. Media goes straight to object storage and is served back through signed links.

Fields: Defined by the department, no code
Media: Image, video, multiple of each
Submission: Single or bulk

Review

Internal review before anything reaches the officer

A reviewer approves or rejects each submission from a queue filtered to their role. Every decision is kept in the submission's history, so a board carries the record of how it got to the register.

Queues: Filtered by role
History: Every transition kept
Concurrency: Optimistic locking on edits

Approval

The municipal officer's decision

Reviewed submissions move to the municipal officer, who approves or rejects them, singly or in bulk. Approval is what turns a submission into a board on the register.

Bulk approval: Yes
Rejection: Recorded in the history

Record

A permanent record for every approved board

On approval the board becomes a record of its own: owner, dimensions, category, ward and zone, location and media. It is the register the department works from and the thing a fee is attached to.

Register: Paginated, filtered, exported to CSV
Location: Stored as geometry, shown on the map

Tax

The fee from the city's own schedule

The municipality's advertising rate schedule is loaded as it stands, category by category. The fee comes from the board's length and breadth and the rate for its category, with a floor for the smallest boards and dimension checks before any fee is set. Every rate change is recorded with who made it and when.

Formula: Length by breadth, by category
Floor: Applied to the smallest boards
Audit trail: Every rate change, with its author

Oversight

Boards, revenue and workload in one place

Department heads see the register by category with pinpoint filtering, the performance of each reviewer, and a map view that every role shares. Boards and analytics export to CSV for the department's own reporting.

Analytics: By category, with pinpoint filters
Reviewers: Throughput and turnaround per reviewer
Exports: CSV for boards and analytics

The states a submission passes through

DRAFT: saved in the field, singly or in bulk
SUBMITTED: in the internal review queue
INTERNAL APPROVAL: or rejection, kept in the history
MUNICIPAL APPROVAL: the officer's queue, singly or in bulk
BOARD RECORD: permanent, taxed, on the map

Zones and wards imported from the city's own boundary files

Zones and wards are imported in bulk from the boundary files the municipality already holds, in GeoJSON. Every board is stored as geometry inside those boundaries, so the register can be read ward by ward and the map shows the same thing to every role.

A rollout starts from the files the city has, not from a survey of the city's boundaries.

Boundaries: Zones and wards, imported from GeoJSON
Storage: PostgreSQL with spatial geometry
Map: One view, shared by every role

Image slot: Boards on the ward map.

Boards on the ward map.

Roles, queues and sign in, as the department already works

A root administrator is created when the system is first set up and creates everyone else. Field operators, reviewers and municipal officers each see the queue and the screens their role allows, and nothing else.

Every sign in is confirmed with a one time password, by email or by phone, before a session token is issued.

Who does what

Root administrator: Set up at first start, creates users, zones, wards and survey fields
Field operator: Surveys boards, saves drafts, submits singly or in bulk
Reviewer: Approves or rejects from a role filtered queue, with reasons
Municipal officer: Final approval, singly or in bulk, plus the register and the analytics
Sign in: Username or email with password, or phone, then a one time password, then a token

Stack, deployment and monitoring

GeoBoard is deployed as containers through a pipeline we maintain, exports its metrics to Grafana, and is run by the engineers who built it. The department gets a system that is monitored, not a codebase.

Stack and runtime

Backend: Java 17, Spring Boot 3.4
Security: Spring Security with JWT, one time passwords through an OTP service
Database: PostgreSQL with Flyway migrations, Hibernate Spatial with JTS geometry
Media: Object storage with direct upload and signed view links
Front end: React and TypeScript on Vite, optimised for phones in the field
Deployment: Containers on a CI pipeline to ECS
Monitoring: Actuator metrics to Prometheus and OTLP, dashboards in Grafana

What a rollout needs from the city

01
The boundary files
We import the ward and zone boundaries the city already has, in GeoJSON.
02
The rate schedule
Loaded as the municipality publishes it, category by category, with the floor rule.
03
A first ward
Surveyors start on one ward while the department reviews the first records and settles its queues.

Where GeoBoard comes from

GeoBoard grew out of our work inside a city's property tax platform: the citizen sign in, the event aggregation, the notices. The advertising department had the same shape of problem, a survey of thousands of boards that had to end in a fee the city could defend, and no system that carried a board from the street to the register.

Its first prospect is a corporation whose revenue systems we already run. The product is complete; what remains is a rollout, and we price that as we price everything: a written scope, a weekly demo, and the same team afterwards.

GeoBoard

See GeoBoard on the city's own map

Send us the ward boundaries and the advertising rate schedule. We will show GeoBoard running on them, with a survey, a review and a fee, end to end.