User Guide

The Actor field in the bottom-left of the sidebar stamps your name onto every entry in the audit log — draws, imports, finalizations, and PDF uploads. Login is handled by the parent Transit Tools suite, so this field is how NTD reviewers know who performed each action.

Go to Fiscal Years and click Create fiscal year. FYs run July 1 → June 30. Week 1 starts exactly on July 1 (a partial week if July 1 isn't a Monday) and the final week (52 or 53) ends exactly on June 30.

Open the FY and use the week calendar preview to confirm the boundaries. If you change the algorithm or fix a bad FY, click Regenerate weeks.

On the FY page you'll see three mode cards: Motorbus (MB), Commuter Bus (CB), and Intercity Route 15. For each one set:

• Annual sample target — total valid trips required for NTD this FY.
• Trips per week — how many trips the sampler should draw each week.

Each mode card has three editors. Fill them in before drawing samples:

• Patterns — add each route/direction with its ordered stops and stop-to-stop mileage. Bulk CSV import is on the same page.
• Trip #s — enter base trip numbers (e.g. 43002) and assign a pattern. Choosing Weekday auto-creates the five day variants MO/TU/WE/TH/FR. Saturday and Sunday trips have their own unique numbers.
• Holidays & Exceptions — mark no-service days and schedule substitutions (e.g. Dec 24 → SU schedule). The sampler honors both automatically.

Mid-year route changes (effective dates): When a route's pattern or trip-number assignment changes partway through the FY, add a NEW row in the template with an effective_date set to the day the change goes live (e.g. 2026-12-01). Leave older rows in place — they stay linked to any trips already sampled. The draw automatically picks the version whose effective_date is the latest one on or before each scheduled date, so prior weeks remain reproducible for NTD audit. Imports only replace rows that match the same (pattern_tab, effective_date) — or (base_number, service_class, effective_date) for trip numbers — so prior versions are never silently overwritten.

From the FY page, open a week and click Draw on each mode. The sampler uses a seeded Fisher–Yates shuffle over all eligible trips that week, skipping holidays and applying any schedule substitutions. Every draw is recorded in the audit log with the seed and result.

Each sampled trip can be exported as PDF (for drivers) or Excel(audit-ready, with print area locked to columns A–F). The Excel layout matches the NTD audit format exactly; columns G–R hold reviewer notes.

Two ways to get completed-trip data back into the system:

• Per trip — click a sampled trip on the week page, then Import completed sheet (.xlsx). Review the parsed values, then Save.
• Bulk signed PDFs — on the week page use Bulk signed-PDF upload. Drop multiple PDFs or a ZIP; each file is matched to its sampled trip by filename with a confidence badge. Resolve any ambiguous matches in the panel.

• Boardings must equal alightings for each trip.
• A trip ends at its scheduled terminus — a continuing passenger counts as a new trip.
• A completed sheet with zero passengers is valid as long as every other field is filled (driver, date, vehicle, signature, etc.).
• Any missing non-passenger field makes the trip invalid.
• Odometer entry is not required — mileage comes from the pattern.

The Dashboard shows valid-sample counts vs. annual targets for the current FY, broken out by mode. Use it weekly to make sure you're on pace.

Every meaningful action (draw, edit, finalize, import, PDF upload, manual PDF assignment) is logged with the actor name, timestamp, and before/after JSON. Open a fiscal year → Audit to filter by date range and export to CSV or PDF for NTD archival.

Each mode card on the FY page has a Download templates button that produces a multi-sheet Excel workbook (Patterns, Trip Numbers, Holidays, Exceptions) pre-scoped to that mode and FY, with a README sheet describing the expected columns.

• CB is Monday – Friday only. Weekend tabs in the source workbooks are ignored.
• Trip number day prefixes. Weekday trips share the same base number across MO–FR (e.g. MO43002, TU43002, …). Saturday and Sunday trips use entirely different numbers.
• Partial weeks at FY boundaries. Week 1 may be shorter than 7 days; the final week (52 or 53) always ends on June 30.
• Zero-passenger trips are valid as long as all other required fields are filled.
• Always set the Actor field first — anonymous audit entries weaken NTD reproducibility.