The Gap Between a Walk-Through and a Signed Lease
Banks and ATM deployment companies that select sites through informal walk-throughs are making expensive decisions on incomplete data. A site that looks workable — ground-floor space, decent foot traffic, existing power supply — can become an installation disaster once the deployment crew arrives and discovers that the stair riser height is 210mm and the vault door cannot make the turn at the top landing, or that the electrical meter is 80 meters from the intended kiosk position with no conduit route, or that the seepage condition behind the proposed ATM wall is moderate-to-severe behind a freshly painted surface.
The cost of discovering these details post-commitment is not the survey cost you saved. It's the lease obligation on a space that requires remediation before it can be used, plus the delay in deployment revenue, plus the crew time spent on a site that shouldn't have been contracted.
A structured site survey database that captures the engineering reality of a candidate location before the commercial team signs anything is the difference between a deployable site and a problem you own.
What a Complete ATM Site Record Actually Contains
The structural fields — Structure Type (Load Bearing, RCC Frame, or Steel Frame), Column Size, Rebar in Column, Beam Depth, and Slab Thickness — are the fields that determine whether a vault installation is feasible without structural reinforcement work. A load-bearing structure with undersized column rebar in a neighborhood with seismic activity is a different conversation from an RCC frame building on stable ground. "Any fault in structure" as a free-text field captures the observations that don't fit a checkbox: hairline cracks radiating from load points, visible settling in the floor slab, evidence of prior repair.
Slab voids are the gotcha field. A yes on "Any voids in slab" changes the earthing installation plan, because rod-driven earthing into a compromised slab produces unreliable earth resistance readings — which becomes relevant for every ATM that requires a dedicated earth pit to spec.
Seepage rated from None through Critical is the field that catches the problem the site owner has a strong financial incentive to conceal. A "None" answer from the property owner is not a site survey. A surveyor standing in the space during or after rainfall, checking the wall surface behind the proposed ATM position for moisture migration, produces a rating that's actually worth something.
The Electrical Field as a Go/No-Go Determinant
Voltage Fluctuations and 3-Phase Power Supply Available are binary fields with significant downstream consequences. An ATM installation in a site with documented voltage fluctuations requires a servo-controlled voltage stabilizer in the fit-out specification — an additional cost item that needs to appear in the project budget before the contract is awarded, not after. Three-phase availability determines genset sizing and the distribution board specification.
Distance of Electric Pole captures the last-mile power supply reality that urban site surveys frequently underestimate. A site where the nearest utility pole is 60 meters away requires a cable run that adds material, labor, and often requires municipal permissions for overhead or underground routing. Meter Location determines where the distribution board can reasonably be positioned and how much conduit run is needed to reach the ATM space.
Probable Location for DB is the surveyor's recommendation for distribution board placement — a field that feeds directly into the electrical design package for fit-out.
The Vault Passage Field Is the One Nobody Wants to Explain After the Fact
"Passage for lifting vault and door" is a single text field, but it represents the most expensive thing to get wrong in an ATM site deployment.
An ATM vault assembled in the factory and delivered as a single unit weighs between 800kg and 1,200kg depending on the model. It moves on a hydraulic trolley. The access path from the delivery vehicle to the final installation position must accommodate the vault dimensions plus clearance at every turn, through every doorway, up or down any stairs, past any overhead obstruction. A stair width of 900mm sounds adequate until the vault is 880mm wide and the handrail post reduces effective width to 840mm at mid-landing.
Stairs Width, Riser, and Tread are recorded precisely because these numbers determine whether the delivery team can physically get the vault to where it needs to go. Space for HVAC, Space for Genset, and Space for ATM document whether the mechanical plant can be installed without compromising the operational envelope of the ATM itself.
North Marked in Drawing is the field that confirms the site sketch has orientation data — which is the minimum requirement for an engineering drawing that will be used to plan conduit routing, earthing pit placement, and signage positioning relative to the street frontage.