Filling in a day

The diary opens on today. The day strip across the top moves between days, and Go to date jumps to any day directly.

Who was on site

Three separate registers, because they answer different questions:

Project team on site — your own people. This is what a labour cost query is checked against.

Subcontractors on site — which trades were there, and how many. The record that matters when a subcontractor claims they were on site for six days and you have four.

Visitors register — the client, a building surveyor, an engineer, a delivery driver who needed signing in. On a job with any safety obligation this is not optional, and it is much easier kept daily than reconstructed.

Deliveries

What arrived, and from whom.

Record the docket number and anything wrong with the delivery — short counts, damage, wrong product. That note is what supports a credit claim three weeks later when the supplier’s statement does not match what you received.

Photos

Photographs with captions, and the part of the diary that pays for itself.

Photograph anything you might need to prove: the excavation before the pour, the rock that stopped the digger, the frame the inspector passed, the state of the neighbouring fence before you started.

Caption them at the time

An uncaptioned photo in a folder of two hundred is nearly useless. Thirty seconds of caption while you still remember what you were photographing is what makes it evidence rather than a picture.

Notes

Everything that does not fit elsewhere. Write for someone reading it in a year who was not there — because that is exactly who reads a diary.

Weak	Better
Rain	Rain from 11am, 4 hours lost, pour postponed to Thursday
Delivery	Frame delivery, Surf Coast Steel, docket 88421, 2 bundles short — chased
Client visit	Client on site 2pm, confirmed alfresco extension, variation to follow

Printing a day

Print this day as the diary form produces the day as a formal document.

That is what you attach to an extension of time claim, hand to a superintendent, or keep on file. A printed run of days around a disputed period is a much stronger submission than an assertion about what happened.

Deleting a day

Delete day removes an entry. Use it for a day created by mistake, not to tidy up a day you would rather not have recorded.

A diary with gaps around the difficult weeks is worse than no diary — it invites exactly the question you did not want asked.

Doing it on the phone

Almost all of this is better done on site as the day happens. The app has the same day view, plus dictation for the notes. See The site diary on site.

A workable habit

• Morning — who is on site, in both registers.
• As things happen — deliveries, visitors, anything that goes wrong.
• End of day — the delay figure, and the photos captioned.

Five minutes across the day. The alternative is an hour on Friday producing something that will not stand up.