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We all know that drafting daily construction site reports is a time-consuming administrative activity for construction project managers. As a result, daily reports are often skipped.
That's a shame because, in the end, daily construction reports are all about maintaining quality and managing risk on construction projects. When you make daily reporting a priority, you'll reduce unplanned costs, lower safety risks and keep your project on the right track.
A daily construction site report is an important document for construction managers and supervisors to keep a construction project going without interruptions, incidents or delays. Construction daily reports document all on-site work done for a construction project on a given day: weather conditions, number of working hours, type of work performed, safety observations, potential delays and completed tasks.
Daily construction site reports will help you:
Detect small problems before they become big problems that require expensive solutions.
Improve communication with the other parties involved, avoiding misunderstandings and delays.
Detect and fix safety issues in time.
Allow you to demonstrate your progress to the customer and help them understand your process, which will cause them to have more patience.
Settle discussions and disputes before they escalate. Construction daily reports provide a log of the number of hours worked, the materials used, supplier delays, or weather conditions.
The long-term consequences of not doing proper site inspections and daily reports can be dire: costly accidents, delays, miscommunications, lawsuits and more. All of which will have a significant impact on your bottom line.
In this article, we'll focus on how to structure your daily construction site report and what information should go into it.
USE A CHECKLIST FOR YOUR CONSTRUCTION DAILY REPORTS
If you're looking for a foolproof method for any repetitive multi-step process, you should use a checklist.
Checklists reduce the risk of mistakes while increasing the likelihood everything will get documented. This frees up your mental space because you don't need to think about what should still be reviewed.
Creating daily site reports is a process that's repeated every day. To make sure that every single inspection covers all elements that need to be reviewed and that nothing is overseen, a checklist can be an essential tool. Without using a checklist, our human brain will easily forget things.
When using a checklist, you will see exactly which items have already been reviewed and you can resume the site inspection from there.
During your daily site inspections, you can review the checklist and complete the items to review with text and pictures. The result of such a site inspection is your daily site report that you can send to all parties involved.
WHAT SHOULD GO INTO YOUR SITE REPORT CHECKLIST?
The main items that should go into your daily site report checklist:
Weather conditions
Labor attendance and time spent
Tasks in progress and tasks completed
Equipment used and received
Potential delays
Safety observations and accidents
Drawings received