Bookings and confirmations

Bookings tracks who has confirmed they are coming. It is the difference between having sent a call-up and having a trade on site.

Sent is not confirmed

A call-up that has gone out is a request. A booking is an agreement.

Most lost days on a building site are not caused by a subcontractor letting you down. They are caused by nobody noticing that a subcontractor never replied — and the two look identical right up until the morning nobody arrives.

The unconfirmed list is the one that costs money

A trade that declined tells you something and you re-plan. A trade that never responded tells you nothing, and you find out on the day. Chase silence harder than you chase refusals.

Subcontractors answer from the email

Every call-up email carries a link. The subcontractor opens a page showing the task, the dates and the site, and answers with one click — Confirm Dates or Decline task. They do not need a login.

Their answer lands on the task’s call-up status straight away:

Status	What it means
Not Called	Nothing has gone out yet
Emailed	The call-up has gone; no answer yet
Called	You rang them
Confirmed by phone	They said yes when you rang — you set this one
Supplier Confirmed	They said yes from the email link
Declined	They said no from the email link

The link only answers once. After they confirm or decline, opening it again just shows the answer they gave. If you cancel the booking after the email went out, the link tells them it has been cancelled and to contact the site supervisor.

When a subcontractor declines

A decline from the email link tells people straight away:

• The bell. Call-up declined by subcontractor appears on the bell at the top of the page for the costing’s site supervisor and for everyone with edit rights on the costing. Click it to open Bookings for that job.
• An email to the site supervisor, with the task, the job, the booked dates and the subcontractor’s contact details. Press reply and it goes to the subcontractor.

A confirmation from the link puts Call-up confirmed by subcontractor on the same people’s bell. There is no email for a confirmation, because nothing needs doing.

The subcontractor is only told the builder has been notified when one of these really went out. If nobody could be told, the page asks them to ring the site supervisor instead.

When nobody gets an email

The email needs a site supervisor set on the costing, and that person needs an email address. Without one, only the bell goes. A call-up sent from the older Call up sheet, rather than from Bookings, tells nobody when it is answered; the subcontractor is asked to ring instead. Either way, keep looking at the list: a decline nobody reads costs you the same lost day as a subcontractor who never answered.

Running it

1. Send the call-ups.
2. Answers that come back through the email link record themselves. Record the ones you get by phone as Confirmed by phone.
3. Look at what is still unconfirmed.
4. Chase anything unconfirmed within its notice period.
5. Escalate anything unconfirmed inside a week.

Step four is the whole value. A carpenter who has not confirmed with ten days to go is a mild concern; with two days to go it is a problem you probably cannot solve.

Taking the list off the screen

Two buttons above the list, Excel and PDF, hand you the bookings to send on or pin up.

Both give you the list exactly as it is on screen — the same filters, the same order, the same columns. Filter to Due for call up, hit either button, and that is what you get, not the whole job. The filter you used is printed on the sheet and written into the spreadsheet, so nobody reading it later mistakes a stage for the whole project.

Excel downloads a file that Excel opens straight away. Headings are on the first row, so you can sort and filter it like any other spreadsheet — by call-up date, for instance, to build a ring-around list. The job name, the filter and the date sit underneath the last row.

PDF opens your browser’s print window. Choose your printer to print it, or choose Save as PDF (Windows, Mac and every modern browser offer this) to get a file you can email. It prints landscape, repeats the headings on every page, and marks the rows needing attention in words as well as colour, so a black-and-white printer loses nothing.

The Actions column is left out of both — the buttons in it do nothing on paper.

The weather

A forecast strip sits across the top of the sheet: a week or so of day icons for the project’s site — its postcode — with the wet days shaded yellow. Hover one for the detail.

The same icons appear next to individual dates in the grid — beside a Start date and beside a Call Up date — whenever that date falls inside the forecast. That is the one that earns its place: it puts the forecast next to the decision, so a pour booked into Thursday’s rain is visible while you are still looking at the booking rather than after the concrete is ordered.

Dates further out have no icon, because there is no forecast for them yet.

Treat it as a prompt to ring someone, not as fact. It changes nothing on the schedule and moves no dates — a forecast four days out is a reason to have the conversation early, not a reason to move the booking on its own.

No icons at all?

Either the project has no suburb or postcode yet (add them under Edit Project), or forecasts are not configured on your server. The strip says which.

Chasing

Ring, do not email. A subcontractor who has not answered an email will not answer a second one, and the call takes a minute.

On the phone

The job’s Bookings tile in the mobile app shows the same picture — who is confirmed, who has not replied, and what is coming up. The tile says it plainly: “Not yet confirmed”, “Confirmed”, “Nothing to chase”.

That is the useful place to check it. Standing on site a week out, glancing at who has not answered, is when the gap is still cheap to close. See What you can do on site.

Recording the chase

Then record what was said. “Confirmed by phone with Jim, 2 Oct” is worth having when the truck does not arrive.

When someone cannot make it

Deal with it in the Schedule rather than the calendar, so everything depending on the task moves with it.

Then ask two questions:

Is this task on the critical path? If it has float, a few days may cost nothing. If it is critical, the finish date has just moved.

Can something else be brought forward? Work off the critical path can sometimes fill the gap, so the week is not lost even though the task is.

Confirming twice for the big ones

Some tasks are worth confirming again the day before:

• anything needing a crane or a pump
• anything where several trades have to coincide
• concrete pours, where a no-show wastes a whole crew
• the first day of any new subcontractor on the job

The morning of a pour is the wrong time to discover the pump is on another site.

Bookings and the calendar

The Calendar shows what is booked on which day, which is the fastest way to spot two trades booked into the same space at the same time — or a day with nobody on site at all.

Both are worth catching a week out rather than on the day.