Track every pit, pipe, truck, and treatment plant in one registry, so a sanitation service can be counted, costed, and kept running.
A pit latrine, a vacuum truck, and a sewer main can all serve the same households, but the records about them rarely sit together. Containment data comes from a household survey, the fleet lives in a spreadsheet, and the treatment plant appears in a consultant's report. None of it combines, so the basic questions go unanswered: how many people the service reaches, which assets have failed, and what it will cost to keep them running.
Sanitation assets in mWater hold the whole chain in one registry, from the toilet to the outfall, described with the same fields whether the service is sewered, on-site, or a mix of both.
Those fields come from the Sanitation Asset Standard, published by mWater Foundation in 2026 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. A published standard beats a private field list for a plain reason: the record means the same thing to the operator, the district office, the regulator, and the next software vendor. Nothing about it is locked to one platform, so the data can move. Water shows what that is worth at scale. Since the Water Asset Standard appeared in 2022, users have mapped nearly 1.1 million water assets.
Three example systems are open to view, one for each shape the standard has to cover. Explore them as the fastest way to see what a finished registry looks like before building anything.
Every asset belongs to a sanitation system, the root record for a service. The system is classified as sewered, non-sewered, or mixed, and carries the service-level facts: operator, management type, households in the service area, households served, design capacity in population equivalent, and total treatment capacity. Sewered and mixed systems also record the network type, separate or combined, and the sewer technology, which covers conventional gravity, simplified or condominial, settled small-bore, pressure, and vacuum.
Assets sit beneath the system in a parent-child hierarchy that mirrors the real infrastructure. A pump belongs to a pumping station, and the station belongs to the system. Version 1.0 of the standard defines 27 asset types and 211 attributes. The sanitation system is the first of those types, and the 26 below it divide into six classes.
Every asset record opens with the same core: basic information, location, hierarchy, status and condition, financial, technical, hydraulic, contacts, and metadata. One further section then appears for the type chosen, and only that one. Pick Containment and the form asks about compartments, lining, and emptying access. Pick Treatment and it offers 35 process types, from screens and waste stabilization ponds to UASB reactors, constructed wetlands, drying beds, and membrane bioreactors.
Asset type is the only required answer. Every other field can stay blank and be filled in later, and conditions hide what does not apply, so a septic tank never shows the questions meant for a sewer jetter.
The financial section holds current replacement cost, expected useful life, probability and consequence of failure, and the resulting asset risk, which is the raw material of a capital plan. The hydraulic section holds the upstream and downstream asset on each record, which is what allows tracing a flow path or a blockage later. The hierarchy section holds seven free-text levels for an existing asset coding scheme, so a utility's own numbering survives the move.
The standard describes assets, not daily work. It records a vacuum truck and its tank capacity, not the route the truck drove yesterday. Operational data attaches to the registry through surveys, workflows, integrations, and the customer management and billing features.
A sewer utility, a fecal sludge operator, and a national regulator all use the same standard, but not in the same order. Start with the assets that carry the most weight for the service in question.
Sewered services should begin with the treatment plant as a facility, then the trunk and collector sewers, the manholes on them, and any pumping or lift stations. Customer connections come once the network is in place, and the outfall closes the chain, with its receiving water named and classified.
On-site and fecal sludge services should begin with containment: septic tanks, pits, twin pits, composting chambers, container-based units, and biodigesters. Three containment fields decide whether the service can answer the safely managed question, so fill them even when the rest is unknown. Lined or sealed records whether the unit is watertight. Outlet arrangement records where the effluent goes, including to open ground or a water body. Emptying access records whether a truck can reach it, whether only manual emptying is possible, or whether it cannot be emptied at all. From there, add the vehicles, the transfer stations, and the treatment plant that receives the load.
Regulators and program managers should begin at the system level and go no deeper at first. One sanitation system per provider or per town, with type, management type, operator, and households served, produces a national picture long before field mapping finishes. Operators then fill in assets beneath their own systems.
Services reporting on equity and inclusion should look at the sanitation point record, which holds usage arrangement, number of cubicles, whether separate facilities exist for women and girls, pan style, and wheelchair access.
Three routes lead into the registry, and most programs use more than one. Map in the field where no reliable record exists. Import where a usable spreadsheet already exists. Use the MCP server where the existing records are messy enough that matching them to the standard is the hard part.
The Assets tile in the app now covers water and sanitation together. Open it, create or open a sanitation system, and add assets beneath it. Anything added from inside a system view joins that system, so there is no risk of stranding an asset.
Privacy controls who can see and edit the record, with Private, Protected, and Public as the choices. Private sites can only be seen and edited by your organization. Protected sites can be edited by your organization, but managed by all. Public sites are available for all. Managed By names the user or organization allowed to edit it. Most real services should be Private or Protected and managed by an organization rather than a person. Assets can carry different permissions from the system above them, so the existence of a treatment plant can be public while its details stay private. Read the guidance on roles and permissions and organizations before setting these on a live service.
Location behaves differently by type. Pipes and channels take a line, drawn waypoint by waypoint or walked with the phone GPS, and everything else takes a point. Pipe length is calculated from the drawn line, so it only needs typing in when the line has not been mapped. Setting the start node and end node on each line records which assets it connects.
Import suits utilities and programs that already hold asset lists in Excel, a GIS export, or an old database. Create the sanitation system first. Then open the Sites page in the portal, choose Import, and select sanitation assets as the type. The template carries every attribute in the standard, which makes it wide, but only the columns held need filling. Use one row per asset, and park any existing asset numbering in the hierarchy levels rather than discarding it.
Line geometry imports in either pipe-delimited or Well-Known Text format. A pipe-delimited line reads 0,0 | 1,2 | 3,4 and the same line in WKT reads LINESTRING(0 0, 1 2, 3 4). Map that column to the Location field during import.
Old records rarely match the standard column for column. A spreadsheet may hold "tank size" where the standard expects storage volume, or mix containment and sanitation point data in a single row. The MCP server lets an AI assistant read those records, work out how they map onto the standard, and prepare the import.
Control stays with the account holder. The connection inherits the account's permissions and nothing more, and queries are read-only. The assistant never writes data. It prepares proposed changes that appear on a review page in the portal, where a person approves or rejects each one. Generate the connection link from the account page and treat it like a password, because it appears only once.
Surveyors work faster with a fixed order of work. Print this protocol and hand it out, or adapt it to the service being mapped.
1. Before leaving the office. Confirm the surveyor's username belongs to the right organization. Log into the app on wifi or mobile data, and check that all three sync status boxes are green before going offline.
2. Find or create the system. Search the map and the search box by name or unique ID before creating anything, because a system with missing coordinates will not appear near the current location. If nothing exists, create the system, set its type, and place its location anywhere inside the service area. Add photos that help someone recognize the site later, such as the office, the plant entrance, or the main tank.
3. Decide the shape of the system. Large services are easier to manage when grouped into subsystems, for example one per catchment, ward, or treatment stream. Small services can hold assets directly under the system.
4. Map along the sanitation chain. Follow the service, not the convenience of travel. On a sewered service that means connections, sewers and manholes, pumping stations, treatment units, outfall. On an on-site service it means sanitation points and containment, then vehicles and transfer stations, then treatment and the disposal or reuse point. Record the type first, then the location, then whatever else is known.
5. Record what can be verified, and nothing more. Read nameplates for manufacturer, model, and serial number. Ask operators and caretakers about installation dates and capacities. Photograph anything ambiguous. Leave a field blank rather than guessing, since a wrong value is harder to find and fix later than a missing one.
6. Connect the network. Set the upstream and downstream asset on pipes, channels, and manholes while mapping them. Set conveyed content at the same time, since a combined sewer and a sludge rising main look alike on a map and behave nothing alike.
7. Sync every day. The app syncs only while it is open on the phone. Return to the home page at the end of each working day, confirm the three sync status boxes are green, and press Sync Now if needed.
A registry earns its cost through what attaches to it. Custom data comes from surveys: add a site or asset question, deploy the survey, and enumerators can start an inspection from the asset itself. A pit emptying record, a plant performance check, and a sludge quality test all link back to the asset they describe.
Faults raised against an asset become workflows, which can be assigned, tracked, and closed. You can also run longer processes around workflows, such as a desludging request from call to completion.
For analysis, assets act as a data source in dashboards, maps, and data grids. Related surveys sit alongside the asset fields, so inspection results can be charted against asset condition. The same data grid exports to a spreadsheet for reporting or for handover to an engineering tool.
The full Sanitation System Management Standard sets out every asset type, every attribute, and the definitions behind them. It is the reference for classifying an unusual asset or aligning an existing schema. mWater Foundation published version 1.0 in 2026, covering sewered and on-site sanitation, and is now collecting real records to validate it. Have feedback? Contact us: info@mwater.co.