Construction and Site handbook

Site answers four questions every single day:

• Who was here, and for how long? The attendance register, which becomes the labour cost.
• What happened today? The diary: weather, progress, visitors, problems, photographs.
• What arrived, and was it right? Deliveries counted and confirmed against what procurement ordered.
• Is the work safe and correct? Permits before high-risk work, checklists during it, inspections after it.

Because ConstruC is department-first, site sees works, labour, materials and quality while Finance holds the money and Procurement holds the orders. What makes the platform strong is that site records a fact once and every other department receives it.

The one idea to hold onto. The site record is the primary source. A crew's hours become the labour cost, a delivery count becomes stock and spend, a progress entry becomes earned value. Nobody re-types any of it — which means if the site record is thin, every number downstream is thin too.

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FIG 2.1 — the daily loop. Each step is one screen, and each writes to something another department reads.

1. Open permits for any hot works, excavation, confined space or work at height starting today.
2. Mark attendance — crews and workers, hours, so the day's labour cost is real.
3. Write the daily log — weather, what happened, who visited, photographs.
4. Receive deliveries — count what physically landed and confirm it.
5. Record progress against the bill of quantities.
6. Run the checks — safety checklists, and inspection sign-offs where a hold point is reached.
7. Raise snags for anything defective, with a photograph.

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FIG 3.1 — the site link map. Four departments tell site what to do; site tells four departments what actually happened.

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Site reads drawings from its own section rather than having to know they live under Design. Same route, same permission: reading only. Uploading, marking up and issuing revisions stay with Design.

Sheets are organised into sets with a discipline and a revision history, so what you open is the current issue rather than whatever was printed last month.

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One record per day: date, weather, GPS location, a narrative of what happened, visitors, delays, and photographs.

The diary is the project's memory. It is what a delay claim is argued from, what an insurer asks for, and what tells you six months later why a week was lost. Photographs are the part people skip and later wish they had not.

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Crews are the standing units — a gang with a trade, optionally tied to a subcontractor and a cost code. Attendance records who worked, on what date, for how many hours, at what rate.

That last part is the point: hours times rate is labour cost, and it posts straight to the shared cost ledger as an actual cost against the crew's cost code. Nobody re-enters it in Finance.

Two guards sit on this data because it is money:

• One record per crew per day. The same gang cannot be entered twice for a date — that would inflate both the headcount and the cost. A genuine offline re-send is still recognised as the same record.
• A crew with history cannot be deleted. Once attendance or payments exist against it, the crew stays, or the ledger would point at nothing.

Subcontracted crews are different. Where a crew belongs to a subcontractor, their cost arrives through that subcontractor's invoices instead — so attendance for them is recorded for the workforce count without posting a second cost. Counting it twice would inflate the job.

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Attendance can be recorded two ways: typed into the day's diary, or entered on the Attendance register. Both are legitimate, and they are the same day's labour.

The diary shows the day's labour whichever way it was entered — rows attached to that log, plus rows on the same date attached to no log. Rows belonging to a different diary on the same date stay with that one, so two diaries for one day never both claim the same crew.

Why this is called out. It used not to work. The diary read only rows explicitly typed into it, so a crew recorded on the register was invisible from the diary for the very same date. On a real project all sixty attendance rows carried no diary link, across twelve dates — a diary reading "nobody worked" beside a register showing twelve days of crews and a ledger owing them 86,040.

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The labour ledger has three figures and they always reconcile:

Payments record an amount, a method — cash, bank or mobile money — and a reference: the transfer id, receipt or voucher number. The reference proves the transfer; the recorded-by proves who made it.

Paying does not double the cost. The labour was expensed when attendance was recorded. The payment is a settlement: it clears the wages liability and records the cash leaving. Edit or delete a payment and that entry is reversed automatically, so the books follow reality rather than drifting from it.

Outstanding labour is one of the first figures on Finance's dashboard under "we owe", because unpaid workers are the most urgent debt on any site.

A control worth knowing. Anyone on site can record a payment, but deleting one needs a site lead. A disbursement should not be quietly erased by the person who entered it.

FIG 8.1 — attendance creates the obligation and the cost; payment discharges it. Finance reads both without re-keying either.

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A single day's spend, drawn together: labour from attendance, materials consumed, plant hours, and site expenses, with the headcount beside it.

It answers a question a monthly report cannot: what did today cost, and was it worth it? A day with a high headcount and no progress is visible here long before it shows up in a variance report.

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Progress is recorded against the priced bill, item by item, as a percent complete. That is deliberate: measuring against money rather than against a feeling is what makes progress comparable to cost.

Each entry carries its date, so the platform builds an S-curve of progress over time. Those percentages become earned value in Finance — the basis of the cost performance index and the forecast at completion.

FIG 10.1 — a percentage typed on site is what the whole cost forecast rests on.

Where a bill item is linked to a milestone, reaching 100% completes that milestone automatically — and if the figure is later corrected below 100%, the milestone reverts. It reverts only milestones that were auto-completed; one a person marked done by hand is never undone behind their back.

Thin progress makes thin forecasts. Where only a few items are measured, the earned-value figures rest on those few. Finance now says so rather than presenting a confident forecast built on very little.

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The material view shows the schedule from site's side: what is planned, what is on order, what has been delivered, and what is physically on hand.

Two movements are always available: used, when material is consumed, and adjustments, for corrections and losses. Receiving is where it gets careful — see the next section.

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Goods arriving on a live purchase order are recorded through the delivery, not through a quick tick. The shortcut is switched off for those materials on purpose: a delivery raises stock and books the real cost, and letting both routes raise stock would count the same goods twice. Materials with no order — petty or site-bought — still use the manual route.

On top of that sits the site's own count. The crew counts what physically landed, and the platform cross-checks it against the recorded delivery. When they tally, the arrival is confirmed. When they do not, it is flagged and the site lead, procurement lead and project manager are told the exact gap.

FIG 12.1 — the count is a cross-check, never a second receipt. It never moves stock, so the same goods cannot be counted twice.

If the Received button is greyed out, that material is on a purchase order — record its arrival under Deliveries. Used and adjustments are never blocked.

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Reusable templates — toolbox talks, scaffold checks, plant inspections — filled in as responses against a date and a crew. Because they are templates, the same check is asked the same way every time, which is what makes the record worth anything in an investigation.

Checklists work offline and sync when signal returns, because they are filled in where the work is.

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High-risk work needs written authorisation before it starts. Eight kinds are supported:

Hot works · Working at height · Excavation · Confined space · Electrical · Lifting · Demolition · Other

A permit carries the work being permitted, its location, the period it is valid for, the precautions attached, and who issued it.

The register does not just show what somebody last clicked — it derives the live status from the validity window, so a permit nobody remembered to close is still caught:

FIG 14.1 — the permit lifecycle. The dotted path is the one that gets people hurt.

The discipline that matters: a permit is closed when the work is done, not left open. An open permit for finished work is worse than no permit, because it says the control is not being kept.

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An inspection and test plan lists the checks a work section must pass, in order, with the specification each refers to. The plan is draft, then active while the work proceeds, then complete.

Each point is one of three kinds, and the sequence is enforced:

A hold is a real stop. Nothing later in the plan can be offered for inspection while an earlier hold is unreleased, and releasing one can be routed through the firm's approval chain rather than being one person's decision.

An inspector offers a point, then decides it — pass, fail (fix and re-inspect), or waive — with a note and photographs of the actual condition.

FIG 15.1 — the inspection cycle. A fail loops back to re-inspection; a hold blocks everything behind it.

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Defects, with a severity, a location, a photograph and an owner. They move through open, in progress, resolved, disputed, closed.

FIG 16.1 — the snag lifecycle. Disputed loops back rather than dead-ending, because disagreement is a stage, not a failure.

Disputed is there deliberately: not every snag is agreed, and a defect list that cannot record disagreement is a defect list people stop trusting. Open snags flow into the handover pack, because a project is not finished while they are outstanding.

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The close-out pack: practical completion date, the defects liability period in months, the handover items and their evidence, the client's signature, and the open defect count.

Handover reads the snag list directly. A project cannot be signed off clean while defects are open, and the pack says how many there are rather than requiring anyone to remember.

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Something on site does not match the drawing. Photograph it, note it, and raise it — and it becomes a task or an RFI for Design without a phone call or an email.

This is the loop that usually happens verbally and is therefore never recorded. Here the observation, the photograph, the question and the answer stay attached to each other.

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Work packages and their owners, shared with other departments. One owner per package, and task completion rolls up into the package's progress, with a manual override where the roll-up does not reflect reality.

Site uses it to see who owns what, so a problem is raised with the right person rather than broadcast to everyone.

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Working offline is the point. Sites lose signal. These records are captured on the device and synced when signal returns: daily logs and their photographs, attendance, crews, safety checklists and their templates, progress entries, snags and their photographs, and plant usage.

FIG 20.1 — why syncing twice is safe: each write carries its own identifier, so the second arrival is recognised rather than duplicated.

Each offline write carries its own identifier, so a record synced twice is recognised as the same record rather than duplicated. Last write wins on a conflict.

Separation of duties. You cannot verify a delivery you recorded, or confirm one you recorded or verified. Attendance is corrected rather than deleted — it is a financial record, and a deletable pay record is not a record.

Roles.

Your company's data is yours alone. Every log, crew, attendance row and payment carries the company that owns it, and every query is scoped by it. Which company you belong to comes from your signed-in session, never from anything the request can set.

Department boundaries hold. A site lead reads site, plus the surfaces deliberately shared with them — drawings to build from, the material status they receive against, the programme. Finance, QS, procurement and equipment screens are refused at the data layer, not merely hidden from the menu.

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The daily discipline

1. Permits first — before anyone starts hot works, excavation or work at height.
2. Attendance early — it is the day's labour cost, not a formality.
3. The diary with photographs — the part you will want in six months.
4. Count deliveries yourself — your count is the independent half of the check.
5. Progress against the bill — measured, not estimated.
6. Snags with a photograph — a defect without one is an argument later.
7. Close permits when the work is done.

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This handbook describes Construction & Site as built. Everything recorded here becomes somebody else's number — which is why the record matters more than the report.