If someone on your aquatics staff sent you this, they are not asking for a nicer tool. They are telling you that the facility's compliance record currently lives on paper, and that they cannot prove what happened last July without going to find a box.
Taking this into a budget meeting? This page is formatted to print as a handout — decorative chrome drops away and the worksheet below becomes fill-in-by-hand lines.
New York pools operate under Subpart 6-1 of the State Sanitary Code. These are the obligations that sit with your facility whether or not anyone is watching this week.
Complete daily operation records are kept for each pool on forms approved or furnished by the State Commissioner of Health, and a copy stays at the facility for 12 months. Pools larger than 3,000 square feet, or disinfected with gas chlorine, must be maintained by a qualified swimming pool water treatment operator. The pool can be immaculate; if the record is not there, the requirement is not met.
Lessons cancelled, camp groups turned away, refunds, and a phone call to whoever you report to. You already know what a closed weekend costs your facility — we do not, and we are not going to invent a number for it.
pH and free and total chlorine (or bromine) are tested and recorded at the beginning, during, and at the end of every swimming period — not once a day. Chlorinated pools hold pH between 7.2 and 7.8, and a free chlorine residual of 5.0 mg/l or a pH of 8.2 may not be exceeded. Nobody inspecting a binder can tell the difference between a reading that was never taken and one that was taken and never written down.
A full report of any injury or illness incident at the pool goes to your permit-issuing official within 24 hours, and a notation is recorded in a log book. This covers incidents resulting in death, requiring resuscitation, requiring referral for medical attention, or bather illness associated with water quality. A year later, that log book notation and the chemistry around it are the account of what happened.
Supervision staff hold current certification in aquatic injury prevention and emergency response, issued by the American Red Cross or another certifying agency accepted by the State Commissioner of Health. A certification that has quietly lapsed is a supervision gap. Nobody announces it. A spreadsheet only helps if somebody opens it.
Seasonal staff leave in September. A successor cannot reconstruct last season from a filing cabinet, and a records request in October is about a July that nobody in the building remembers.
Plain-language summary of published regulations, not legal advice. Requirements vary by facility class and are enforced by your county health department — confirm current obligations with your permit-issuing official. Citations reviewed 2026-07-24 against the published text of Subpart 6-1 . A fuller walkthrough is on our New York pool compliance page.
We have no idea what your facility spends on recordkeeping, and we are not going to quote you a statistic from someone else's press release. Put your own numbers in. The arithmetic is visible, it happens in your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere.
The line that usually surprises people is not the testing — it is the transcription. Reading a test kit takes seconds. Writing it on a sheet, walking the sheet to an office, filing it, and finding it again in October is where the hours actually are.
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Your numbers. Change anything that looks wrong.
(pools × days × checks × minutes) ÷ 60 + cert hours × 12 + prep hours × pools = hours / year
This is arithmetic on numbers you entered. It is not a benchmark, a study, or a claim about what Aqua Mage will save you. Aqua Mage does not remove the test — someone still walks the deck and reads the kit. It removes the transcription, the filing, the searching, and the reconstruction.
Outdoor budgets in New York are set in the winter for a season that opens in May. Indoor facilities run year-round and can start whenever. Either way, the shape of the commitment matters more than the number:
Most aquatic software assumes one facility with one manager. Parks departments, Y associations, and school districts are the opposite: several sites, one accountable person, and staff who move between them mid-season.
Details by facility type: parks & rec, YMCAs & JCCs, summer camps, schools & campuses.
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