A free site diary template in Excel: one row for each job each day, with labour, plant, deliveries, weather, instructions and delays, so a week, a job or every delay can be found in seconds. No sign-up and no email address.
Download the site diary (Excel, 21 KB)
What it records
- The date, and the day, filled in from the date.
- The weather, morning and afternoon.
- Labour: your own operatives, and each subcontractor with how many people.
- Plant on site, and deliveries with the ticket number.
- Work done that day.
- Instructions received: what, and from whom.
- Delays or stoppages and why.
- Visitors and inspections, and accidents or near misses.
- Where the photos are kept, and who wrote the entry.
Why it matters
The diary is the record everyone asks for when a delay, a variation or an accident is argued later. Commentary published by NEC calls site diaries that record daily resources, progress, stoppages and the reasons for them "indispensable tools in demonstrating cause and effect", and notes that photographs need their date and location. Under the NEC Engineering and Construction Contract, a compensation event that is not notified within eight weeks of the contractor becoming aware of it can be lost, which is one more reason to write it down the same day.
The full story, and how to get a diary written on the day rather than on Friday, is in Why the site diary arrives on Friday.
Questions
Is the template free?
Yes. Download it, change it and share it. There is no sign-up and no email address to give.
Why one row per day instead of a page per day?
A row per job per day can be filtered: one job, one week, or every day with a delay, in seconds. A page per day has to be read page by page when someone asks what happened in March.
Can the site manager fill it in on a phone?
In the Excel app, yes, but a spreadsheet is awkward on a phone. A short form on the phone that saves to the same list, with photos, is what gets a diary written the same day. That is what I build on Microsoft 365.