Sitework Contractors Lose Money Between the Trench and the Office. Here Is the 90-Second Fix

The gap nobody budgets for

Every sitework contractor we have talked to, from a three-crew excavation outfit to a grading company running twelve jobs, has the same gap. Production happens on site on Tuesday. The office learns what happened on Thursday or Friday, from a text message, a photo of a paper sheet, or the foreman's memory at the end of the week. Payroll gets entered from that. Job costing gets entered from that. And the number that actually matters, how many yards, feet or tons the crew produced against what the estimate said they would, is worked out at the end of the job, when nothing can be done about it.

That gap has a cost, and it is not small. On a job bid at 350 yards a day where the crew is doing 280, every day the office does not know is a day the loss keeps growing. A week is a lost margin. Three weeks is a lost job.

Why the apps you have tried did not stick

Most contractors have tried something. A general construction app, a time-tracking app, a shared spreadsheet, a form in a messaging app. They stop being used within a month, and it is always for one of two reasons.

It needed signal. Trenches, cuts, rural sites and half the basements in the country have none. An app that spins on a loading screen at 4pm when the crew wants to go home gets deleted.

It needed the office to type first. If the foreman cannot start the day until someone has set up the job, the cost codes, the crew list and the equipment, the app is already behind the paper sheet, which needs nothing.

Anything that fails either test is not a field tool. It is an office tool with a mobile login.

What a daily production log actually needs

We spent the design phase of SiteDay with foremen and owners before writing code, and the list of what a day's record must contain turned out to be short:

1. Who was on site and for how many hours. Crew hours are payroll and they are labour cost. Both need to be right the same day.
2. Which machines ran and for how long. Equipment hours drive owning-and-operating cost, maintenance schedules and, for rented iron, the invoice you will get.
3. What was produced, by cost code. Yards excavated, feet of pipe laid, tons placed, square feet graded. This is the number the estimate was built on and the only way to know if the job is on plan.
4. Photos and a note. The proof for the client, the record for a dispute, and the context for whoever reviews the day.
5. A clear "the day is finished". So the office knows what is complete and what is still being edited.

Everything else, weather, delays, visitors, deliveries, is useful but optional. If capturing the five things above takes more than a couple of minutes, the foreman will stop doing it.

The 90-second rule

We wrote one sentence at the top of the SiteDay specification and every decision had to pass it: the foreman must be able to log a day with no signal in under 90 seconds; if a feature makes that slower or needs the office to type first, it does not ship.

The second day on a job is the test, because that is when the crew and machines are already known. On the second day, logging a full day in SiteDay is five taps and about 80 seconds: yesterday's crew is preselected, yesterday's machines are preselected, quantities are entered against the cost codes already on the job, two photos from the camera, finish. It works with the phone in airplane mode. When signal comes back, the day syncs in the background, once, with no duplicates, even if the phone was restarted in between.

What the office and the owner get out of it

The reason to make the field side that fast is what it makes possible on the other end.

• The same evening, every job on one screen. Which jobs have submitted, which foreman has not, and for each cost code, actual against plan for the day, coloured green, amber or red. The owner sees the 280-yard problem on the day it happens, not at the end of the job.
• A daily report, generated and emailed. A branded PDF for the client or the general contractor goes out automatically after the cutoff time. Nobody types it.
• Job to-date. Total produced against total planned per cost code, days worked, average per day against the plan rate, and estimated labour and machine cost, updated daily.
• A weekly roll-up. Hours by person, hours by machine, production by job, for payroll and for the Monday meeting.
• QuickBooks Online. Approved labour and equipment hours export as time activities against the right customer and service item, with a sync log showing exactly what went across. Payroll and job costing stop being re-keyed.

Who this is for

SiteDay is built for the contractors who prepare a site before anyone builds on it: excavation, mass grading, site utilities, storm and sewer, paving and site concrete crews, typically three to thirty crews. If your production is measured in yards, feet and tons rather than in tasks, and your crews work where the signal does not, it was designed around your day.

It is live now at siteday.app, with pilot crews running on it. Setup is done with you, not by you: we load your jobs, cost codes, people and equipment from your existing spreadsheets or your QuickBooks file, so the foreman opens the app on day one and everything is already there.

If your problem is a different shape

Not every contractor's gap is between the trench and the office. Some lose it at the estimate, and for that we build estimation and quoting tools. Some lose it between departments, which is where a custom operations system fits. We are a software company headquartered in Lahore that ships for construction businesses in the UAE, the UK, the US and Pakistan, and SiteDay is what we build when we build for ourselves.

See how SiteDay was built in the case study, or book a free call and tell us where your production numbers go missing.