Short answer

Yes — always. The pin lands where the phone was, not where the asset is. The standard process is a two-step capture: photograph everything in the field, then do a pin-nudge pass on the web app afterwards — open the map, switch to satellite imagery, and drag each new asset's pin onto the asset itself. Five seconds per asset, and your register goes from "roughly right" to genuinely accurate.

Detail

Phone GPS is typically 5–20 metres off — worse under tree cover, near buildings, or when the operative stands back to fit the asset in frame. That's fine for capture, but left uncorrected it degrades almost everything downstream:

  1. Park maps mislead. A swing that renders outside the playground, a bin in the middle of a road. The routine-detail map draws its markers from the linked assets' locations, so field teams see the drift every day.
  2. Location tags go wrong. Tags inherit from the drawn area the asset sits inside. A pin a metre outside the park polygon inherits a street name instead of the park's tag — so the asset effectively files itself under the wrong place. (This was the root of a whole class of mis-tagged assets at Thetford, June 2026.)
  3. Inspections point to the wrong spot. Sub-tasks inherit the asset's location at creation; an operative navigating to an imprecise pin wastes time at exactly the moment the system should be saving it. For bus-stop-style assets, the pin should be at the stop.

The pin-nudge pass, step by step:

  1. After an upload session, open the web app's asset map (or the assets list filtered to the new batch — sort by created date).
  2. Switch the basemap to satellite imagery — play equipment, bins, benches, and shelters are individually visible from above, so you can see exactly where each item really is.
  3. Open each new asset, drag its pin onto the asset in the imagery, save.
  4. If an asset should sit inside a drawn area (park, depot, cemetery), check the pin is inside the polygon boundary — that's what drives the location tag.

Build it into the capture habit: photograph in the field in the morning, nudge pins at the desk after lunch. Batching makes it quick — a 30-asset park takes a few minutes.

Watch-outs

  • Nudge before drawing conclusions from tags. If location tags look wrong across a site, check pin positions first — drift outside the area polygon is the usual cause, not a tagging fault.
  • Areas first, then upload, then nudge. Tags are applied at creation, so draw and tag your areas before uploading (see How do map areas work, and how do location tags get inherited?). The nudge pass then fixes the stragglers whose GPS landed outside.
  • Moving a pin does not retro-update past inspections — task locations were inherited at task-creation time. Future tasks pick up the corrected position.
  • Don't skip it on bulk days. The bigger the upload session, the more valuable the pass — and the harder it is to remember which bench was which a week later. Nudge while the field visit is fresh.