Digital shooting logbook: the app every sport shooter uses

What is a shooting logbook?

A shooting logbook is a sport shooter's record. Every session goes in: date, club, discipline, distance, firearm, score, conditions, notes. Stamped by a club officer, it becomes your official history and the proof of consistent practice.

For French federations, it's the document that validates the three consecutive seasons required to access category B firearms. For you, it's your progression: looking back over 18 months and seeing your 25m group shrink from 12 cm to 4 cm is what keeps you coming back.

The topic has never been more alive. Competition, sharing between friends, clean archives, multi-discipline tracking — the logbook isn't just a notebook you fill on the way out of the range anymore. It's a tool that deserves to evolve.

The paper logbook — limits in 2026

Paper did the job for 50 years. In 2026 it's starting to crack. Five limits keep coming up:

• Lost. You move, you drop the bag, the logbook is gone. So is your history.
• Unreadable. Three years later your hasty handwriting is useless. You can't tell whether that string was 78 or 70.
• No stats. No trend, no average, no visible progress without transcribing everything by hand.
• No sharing. You can't compare with a friend without physically handing them the book.
• No validation. The stamp proves the club saw you that day, but nothing in the book proves you actually shot.

Worst part: it discourages use. One shooter in two doesn't keep theirs up to date. Not because they don't care — because paper has become friction.

Digital shooting logbook: what changes

A well-designed shooting logbook app solves all five limits in six features:

• Two-tap entry. Discipline, score, firearm — the app pre-fills the rest from your arsenal and previous sessions.
• Automatic stats. 30-day sparkline, personal best, average, per-discipline trend.
• Cloud backup. Lose your phone, regain everything by logging back in. EU-hosted.
• 4-level sharing. Private, friends, close friends, public. You choose per session.
• GPS validation. The app verifies locally that you were at the range, without publishing your position.
• Multi-discipline. Pistol, rifle, IPSC, shotgun, TAR, long-range precision — one logbook for all.

The point isn't to make you fill in more. It's the opposite: 30 seconds per session, and the rest builds itself.

Shooting logbook and federations

French federations officially recognize the stamped paper logbook. A digital logbook doesn't yet replace it for category B applications and prefecture validations. At the time of writing, the physical club stamp is still mandatory.

What changes: the regulatory side stays on paper, the tracking side goes digital. You keep your federation logbook for official paperwork (details on prefecture authorizations), and you use your digital logbook for everything else: stats, progress, sharing, GPS validation, archive.

Mid-term, the reasonable goal is interoperability — exporting a digital session into a federation-accepted format. We're working on it. But digital doesn't wait on paperwork to bring value today.

PewPewLife logbook — how it works

Six steps, thirty seconds per session. Pick your discipline, the app GPS-verifies you're at the range, fill the score and firearm, add a photo if you want (EXIF stripped by default), choose who sees it, save. The session enters your stats, your shooter tier updates, the friends feed updates if you made it visible.

No fluff: learn to log a session covers the full flow step by step, with edge cases (range not listed, no signal, geo-permission denied).

On privacy, read the 9 privacy rules we hold ourselves to. To see how the app measures progression, check the 8 progression tiers.

Every discipline, one logbook

If you shoot several disciplines you know the pain: three apps, three logics, incomparable stats. With PewPewLife everything is in one logbook. Stats stay separated by discipline (we don't mix an IPSC hit factor with a 50m rifle group), but the history is unified.

If you're starting with your first range visit or .22 LR, the logbook captures your sessions from day one.

Logbook FAQ