A sewer system is not a water system with the labels swapped
Most software sold to a wastewater utility is water software renamed. The vendor swaps the labels on a few screens, calls it a sewer product, and hands you a map full of dots. But your day is not billing and high-bill calls. It is jetting a line and logging it, running the lift stations, inspecting manholes, and pushing a CCTV crawler down a pipe. Most of that work happens inside the plant, where a map full of dots quits on you.
Ziptility is asset management and GIS software for small water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities, and it is built for the shape of sewer work. Your crew runs the collection system and the plant in one app on a phone. The inspections, the SSO records, and the compliance log fall out of the work they already do. Here is how that fits a system your size, and where we are honest about what we are not.
What software do small wastewater utilities actually use?
A small wastewater utility uses one app.
It holds the collection system and the plant, runs the work from the field, and keeps inspection and compliance records as a byproduct. The alternative is a GIS map in one place, a work-order tool in another, and CCTV footage on a laptop in the truck.
In Ziptility, every gravity main, force main, manhole, cleanout, lift station, grinder pump, and grease interceptor has its own record. That record holds when it went in, its condition, every inspection, and who touched it last. The work rides on the asset. When an operator jets a line or runs a lift-station round, the record writes itself. Nobody stops to do data entry. It is built for a small crew, not a city IT department. You map the collection system yourself, from the phone in the truck, and pricing is by connections, not per seat, so the whole crew gets the app.
Is wastewater just water with the labels changed?
No. It is a different product, not a worse customer.
We say that as operators who run sewer systems, not as a vendor guessing at it.
A water day leans on the office: turn-ons, shut-offs, high-bill calls, meter reads. A wastewater day leans on the field and the plant. The usage skews to inspect-and-document, not create-a-ticket: you are moving features on the map and adding photos, jetting, manhole inspections, lift-station rounds, CCTV runs. That work usually gets logged somewhere else, on a clipboard or a separate tool, and never makes it back to the asset.
So the wastewater setup is its own thing, with its own asset templates and its own work, not a relabeled water config. (We have watched a setup go sideways because someone loaded only water templates onto a sewer org. The work really is different.)
Can one app handle both the plant and the collection system?
Yes, and the plant is the part most map tools get wrong.
A treatment plant does not model as dots on a map. A headworks or a blower room is a cluster of assets standing in one spot: a parent with children underneath it. That is just not intuitive to point-to-point GIS, and the great majority of a wastewater operator's work happens right there.
This is the honest limit of map-only tools. A sewer operator needs an asset record, not just a map. Ziptility models the plant as parent-child assets. You stand in front of the blower room, open the parent, and see the equipment and its work history underneath. The collection system lives on the same map, so the buried network and the plant are one record instead of two systems.
How do you keep track of buried lines that nobody can see?
The map starts with whatever you already have and gets more accurate every time a crew member is in the field.
Inherited assets come in as gray dots, on purpose, so the crew knows those are the ones to go put eyes on. As they work, the gray fills in with a photo, a depth, a confirmed location, a condition.
This matters more in a collection system than anywhere else, because so much field truth goes buried between visits. New lines go in and the old ones never get capped, so they sit active and undocumented. A manhole gets asphalted over, and the crew that shows up a year and a half later cannot find it. On a living map, the last operator dropped a photo and a note. The next one pulls it right up instead of hunting. A printed map is stale a month after it is made.
What is the best all-in-one software for wastewater inspections, work orders, and compliance?
The best fit is one app where the inspections, the work, and the compliance records all live on the asset. Not three tools stitched together.
Here, the SSO response, the lift-station alarm, the scheduled manhole inspection, and the CCTV run all attach to the asset.
They roll up into one record. The product already classifies the real wastewater jobs. Emergencies are main breaks, service-line breaks, SSO responses, lift-station alarms, and grinder-pump alarms. Scheduled preventive maintenance is manhole inspections, CCTV inspections, pump services, and grease-trap inspections. You close the work in the field, and the record updates on its own.
When the state asks for the documentation, it is already there, because keeping it was a byproduct of running the system. A real user once asked us, unprompted, whether the app works as a CMOM tool. CMOM is the EPA's capacity, management, operations, and maintenance framework for sewer systems. The record it requires falls out of doing the work here.
Does it track CCTV inspections and inflow and infiltration?
Yes, with one honest caveat about CCTV.
You run CCTV and pipe inspections as scheduled work and attach the results to the pipe: condition, observed defects, photos, and the video itself. The video is linked, not stored inside the app, which keeps the map fast out in the field where there is no signal. We are not a CCTV video-coding or NASSCO PACP scoring engine. We hold the inspection record and the footage; the coding stays your inspector's job. For the deep read on how the inspection work runs, see our wastewater inspection guide.
Inflow and infiltration works the same way. You mark the problem spots, document the smoke-test or CCTV findings, and track the remediation over time as work that logs to the asset. There is no flow meter or rain gauge in the app, so for the full flow study you still bring in a modeler. We make it easy to log the problems and fixes and hand that clean data to your engineer. Those models matter once every few years; this app is for the crew in the field every day. For the deeper version, see our inflow and infiltration guide.
The sewer side simply needs more touches than the water side: more inspections, more preventive maintenance, more emergency response, more parts. More work means more to lose when it lives in one operator's head. That is the case for getting it on the map.
Questions operators ask
What software do small wastewater utilities use?
One app that holds the collection system and the plant, runs work from the field, and keeps inspection and compliance records as a byproduct. Ziptility puts the whole sewer system on a living map, priced by connections, not per seat, so the whole crew gets it, and the map fills in from the phone in the truck.
What is the best all-in-one software for wastewater inspections, work orders, and compliance?
The one where the inspections, the work, and the records all live on the asset instead of three separate tools. In Ziptility, the SSO response, the lift-station alarm, the manhole inspection, and the CCTV run all attach to the asset. They roll up into one record you can hand to the state.
Can one app handle the plant and the collection system?
Yes. The collection system lives on the map. The plant is modeled as parent-child assets, so a blower room or a headworks is one parent with its equipment underneath. That is the part dots-on-a-map cannot do. We are the asset record for the plant, not SCADA or a hydraulic model.
Do I need GIS experience to map my sewer system?
No. It is built for operators, not IT departments. Your assets start as gray dots from whatever you already have, and the map fills in as your crew works, from the phone in the truck. You can run it yourself.
How do you track CCTV inspections and lift-station rounds?
You run them as scheduled work and attach the condition, photos, and footage to the asset. Video is linked, not hosted, to keep the map fast offline. We hold the inspection record. We are not a CCTV video-coding or PACP scoring engine.