Short answer

Usually not on its own, and for one specific reason: a consultant's survey describes your assets but does not locate them. Item positions almost always exist only as numbered labels drawn onto aerial photographs in an appendix. A person can read those; software cannot.

So a survey report is nearly always the second of the two import routes in Can I import my asset register from a spreadsheet?: you capture the items in the field carrying the consultant's reference, and the report's findings are then loaded onto those records. Send us the report anyway. It sizes the job, and it is what the capture pass works from.

Everything below is the part that is specific to a consultant's report rather than to imports generally.

Detail

Send the original PDF, not a spreadsheet made from it

Councils often hold the report as Excel, because someone converted the PDF to make it look importable. This normally makes it worse. The conversion breaks the schedule tables across merged cells and half rows, and it turns the site plans into scattered images. If you have both, send the PDF. Whoever walks the site needs the plans legible, and the tables read correctly in the original.

Reference numbers usually are not unique

This is the one that catches people. Survey reports commonly restart numbering at 1 for each site, so a single report can contain four different items called T1. Since the reference is what joins the report to the records, agree a convention with a site prefix before anyone starts capturing, or the references will not identify anything on their own.

Some entries are groups, not items

A survey will record a line of trees along a fence, or an inaccessible patch of scrub, as one grouped reference standing for a dozen actual trees. Decide up front whether a group becomes one record or is split, and be consistent, so the report still matches afterwards. There is more on that decision in Should every tree be its own asset, or can I group them as a clump?.

Where each part of the report ends up

  • Species, description, the consultant's reference sit on the asset record. The reference goes in the External ID field.
  • Recommended works become jobs against the right item, each with a cost, a due date and an assignee, so the outstanding-works list becomes a screen rather than a document.
  • The assessment itself becomes an inspection record against the item.
  • Gradings do not have their own fields. A TPO yes or no flag, stem dimensions, a BS 5837 category, a numeric risk index: these go in the asset's notes as free text. You can read them; you cannot filter or report on them. Plan around that rather than around it changing.

Watch-outs

  • Read the re-inspection dates before you do anything else. A survey specifies intervals from the date it was carried out, and reports often sit a year or more before anyone acts on them. Working out which intervals have already lapsed is usually the single most useful thing to come out of the whole exercise, and you can do it from the report on day one without importing anything.
  • Check who the report was written for. It is common for a council to hold a survey commissioned through its grounds contractor, with the contractor rather than the council named as the client. That does not stop you using it, but it is worth knowing who owns the relationship with the consultant before the next survey falls due.
  • The report is a snapshot. Expect the capture pass to find items that have gone, items that are new and conditions that have changed. That is the ground-truthing working, not a problem with the report.
  • Ask the consultant for coordinates next time. If they hold the survey in a mapping tool, a lat/long or what3words column in the next delivery turns this from route 2 into route 1, and the whole capture problem goes away.