Keeping a shooting log digitally: what belongs in it
A shooting log is quick to start and just as quick to end up full of gaps. What actually belongs in it — and why the columns are not arbitrary.
In short: for the club's Kladde the mandatory fields are date, name and firearm type, retained for ten years. Your personal log may hold more — and should, or it will be of little use to you later.
The fields that have become standard in practice
The Lower Saxony federation publishes a sample Kladde that shows well which fields are expected in practice:
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| Date | The counting unit under § 14 WaffG is the occasion, not the shot. |
| Name, first name | Mandatory in the club's Kladde; trivial in your own log. |
| Type (training / competition) | Marked T, VM, LM in the sample — separates training from championships. |
| Discipline / SpO number | What makes results comparable at all. |
| Firearm type | Mandatory. Long and short guns are assessed separately for possession. |
| Result | Not needed for the record — everything for your own progress. |
| Range officer | The column that confirms the entry in the club's Kladde. |
For competitions, the match announcement, start card or entry list also count as evidence of participation — worth keeping and attaching to the entry.
What paper cannot do
- Count. “How many range days in the last twelve months?” is a manual tally with an error rate.
- Analyse. Without structured entry, results across years are not comparable — different distances, targets and disciplines end up as numbers side by side that have nothing to do with each other.
- Survive. Ten years of documentation in a booklet that travels in a range bag is a risk nobody would take deliberately.
What a digital log does not change
Digital does not mean official. Even a perfectly kept app does not replace the certificate from your club or federation — authorities generally do not accept the log on its own. The full chain is set out in the article on the Bedürfnisnachweis.
The benefit lies elsewhere: your own dates are always complete, you can put them in front of your club, and you see your progress across years instead of across single evenings.
Sources
- NSSV — information sheet on § 14 WaffG record-keeping (PDF, German) — accessed 05.06.2026
- NSSV — sample Vereinskladde (PDF, German) — accessed 05.06.2026
- § 14 WaffG (gesetze-im-internet.de, German) — accessed 05.06.2026