Site reporting application for the construction industry

The context

On a building site, every day costs money: labour hours, plant, materials, agency staff, subcontractors. Traditionally all of that is written on sheets that reach head office several days late — when they do not get lost on the way.

We designed, built and deployed, end to end, a web application that replaces that paper circuit.

What was going wrong

Three difficulties compounded each other.

The delay. A week's spending was only known at head office once the sheets had come back and been re-entered. By the time an overrun showed up, the site was too far along to correct it.

Manual calculation. Every line had to be converted into a cost from rate tables kept separately. It took time, and every transcription was a chance to get it wrong.

No audit trail. A report corrected after the fact kept no record of what it contained before, nor of who changed it. Arguments about a billing discrepancy had no referee.

Who uses it

Three roles, with different rights:

• the site manager enters the day's report from a PC or a tablet;
• the works supervisor checks and adjusts the reports for the sites they are responsible for;
• the administrator gives final approval, maintains the rates and produces the exports.

Everyone signs in with their usual company account and only sees what concerns them.

What the application does

The site manager enters the report in a few minutes: who was on site and for how long, which plant was used, what was delivered, which firms worked there. The application knows the company's rates and automatically calculates the cost of each line, each section and the whole day.

The report then follows a clear approval circuit: the site manager submits it, the works supervisor checks it, the administrator approves it. Every version is kept, so it is always clear who changed what, and when. A mistake spotted after the fact is corrected without having to reopen a report that has already been closed.

At head office, the information is available immediately:

• the cumulative cost of a site over any chosen period;
• an employee's hours for preparing payroll, separating day, night, weekend, weather stoppages and travel zones;
• ready-made exports for invoicing, accounting and profitability tracking.

What it changes

The report can be read at head office on the day it is written, not several days later: managers see overruns during the works, while they can still be corrected.

Because the application does the calculations from the company's own rates, manual transcription disappears from the process, and the data goes straight to payroll and invoicing without being re-entered. Finally, the approval history makes every change traceable — something that simply did not exist on paper.