It is Friday afternoon. The site manager sits in the cabin with a coffee and a blank site diary page for Monday, and tries to remember who was on site, what was delivered, what the weather did on Tuesday and when the excavator broke down.
Nobody plans it this way. The diary is a form, the form is on paper or in a spreadsheet on the office computer, and the site manager is outside doing the job all day. So it waits, and on Friday it gets written from memory. Some weeks it does not get written at all.
Why it matters more than it looks
Most of the time nobody reads the diary. Then something goes wrong, and it is the first document everyone asks for.
- A variation or a daywork sheet is disputed. The question is what was on site that day, and who asked for it.
- A job runs late and the delay has to be explained. Weather, late information, blocked access, other trades: the diary is where those days are recorded, or not.
- There is an accident or a near miss. Who was on site, what they were doing and what briefing they had is the first thing an investigation looks at.
A diary written on Friday from memory is weak evidence in all three. An entry made on the day, with a time and a photo, is hard to argue with.
What a site diary should record
There is no statutory form, and the contract decides what records the client can ask for. Commentary published by NEC describes site diaries "which record daily resource expenditure, progress, stoppages and reasons for the stoppages against each activity performed" as indispensable for showing cause and effect (NEC). Under the NEC Engineering and Construction Contract, a compensation event not notified within eight weeks of the contractor becoming aware of it can be lost, so the diary is also where the clock starts.
For each job, each day:
- Labour: your own operatives and each subcontractor, with numbers.
- Plant on site, and deliveries with the ticket number.
- Weather, morning and afternoon.
- Work done, against the programme.
- Instructions received, what and from whom, including the ones given on site.
- Delays and stoppages, and why.
- Visitors and inspections, and any accident or near miss.
- Photos, with their date and place.
What gets in the way
It is rarely the people. Site managers know the diary matters. The problem is the form.
- It is on paper, so it has to be carried, filled in, brought back and typed up.
- It is a spreadsheet, so it has to be filled in at a computer, and the computer is in the office.
- It asks for too much: twenty fields where five would do, so it gets left for later.
- Nothing happens when it is missing. Nobody notices until the day it is needed.
What a same day diary looks like
The version I build runs on the phone the site manager already carries, inside the firm's own Microsoft 365.
- One screen, a few taps. The job is picked from a list. Labour, plant and deliveries are counts or picks, not paragraphs. Notes are optional.
- Photos instead of descriptions. A photo of the delivery ticket, the flooded trench or the scaffold handover says more than a sentence, and it carries its own date and time.
- Weather filled in. The day's weather for the site can be added automatically, so nobody has to remember Tuesday.
- Filed where the job lives. Each entry is saved under the job in SharePoint with its photos, so the office and the director see it the same day.
- A reminder when it is missing. If a live job has no entry by the end of the day, the site manager gets a message, and the office sees which jobs are behind.
- A PDF when someone asks. A week or a month of entries comes out as one document for the client, the QS or the solicitor.
What it costs to run
In most firms, nothing new. Power Apps, Power Automate and SharePoint come with the Microsoft 365 business plans most contractors already have, and site managers sign in with the account they use for email.
The work is in fitting it to the firm: its jobs, the fields that matter to it, and the people who need to see each entry. You pay for building it, not a monthly subscription per user.
Where to start
Pick one job and one site manager who will try it for a fortnight. Keep the form short: date, job, labour, plant, deliveries, weather, photos, notes. Add a field only when someone asks for it. After two weeks, put the new entries next to the ones written on a Friday and compare.
If you would rather start on paper or in Excel, the free site diary template has the same fields, one row per job per day, and the daywork sheet template covers the days that turn into a claim.
If the diary on your jobs gets written at the end of the week, or not at all, tell me what it looks like now. Half an hour on Teams, no charge, and I will tell you what I would build first and roughly what it would take.