Site Diary & Daywork Record

What this tool does

CM8-110 keeps a site diary and a daywork record. One entry per day: the weather and the ground, who was on site and for how long, what plant was there, what was built, what stopped, why it stopped, what you were told to do, who visited, and what you saw about safety. It totals the labour hours, separates the hours lost by cause, counts the weather days, and prints the lot as a report.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind. That matters for a diary: it is a document that may be read years later by people who were not there, and it should live somewhere you control.

The tool is a record. It does not calculate an extension of time, it does not value a variation, and it does not send a notice to anybody.

Why the day you write it matters

The single thing that gives a site diary its weight is that it is contemporaneous — written on the day, by someone who was there, before anybody knew it would matter.

A diary written up weeks later carries far less weight in a dispute, and everyone reading it will know. The handwriting is too even, the entries are too tidy, the wet days line up suspiciously well with the days you now say you lost. A reconstructed record invites the question of what else was reconstructed, and it can undermine entries that were perfectly genuine.

Two habits protect the record. First, write facts, not conclusions: "gang stood down at 11:00, rain gauge read 21 mm" rather than "lost the day to bad weather". Second, write the neutral days too. A diary that only exists on the days something went wrong is a claim document, not a diary, and it reads like one.

What to record each day

Fill in every field you can, even where nothing happened. "No delays" recorded on eighty consecutive days is what gives the eighty-first day its force.

• Work carried out — what was actually built or installed, where, and how far it got. Reference drawings and grid lines rather than "continued as before".
• Areas worked — plots, grids, levels, zones. This is what lets you show later that a trade was, or was not, in possession of an area.
• Materials delivered — what arrived, how much, and whether it was short or wrong.
• Visitors — who came, when, and why. Attendance is often disputed later.
• Safety observations — what you checked, what you found, what you said to whom.

Weather and ground conditions

Weather entries are only useful if they are consistent. Record the condition, the temperature and the state of the ground every day, in the same units, measured the same way, whether or not it affected the work.

The rain threshold setting is your written definition of the rain that counts as adverse on this site. Set it once, before you need it, and — where your contract or your client's records rely on it — agree it with them in writing. It appears on the weather chart and in the entry preview so the person writing the diary sees the same definition every day.

A day is counted as a weather day only where work was actually affected:

Recording "heavy rain" on a day when the gang worked through it is not a weather day, and should not be. Record the rain anyway — it is the pattern across the whole diary that makes any individual day believable.

Ground conditions are recorded separately because they lag the weather. Ground can be waterlogged on a dry day, and the fact that it was is often more useful than the rainfall itself.

Labour, plant and the hours calculation

Enter the number of operatives and the hours each of them worked. The tool multiplies:

This is the one place where a small habit error costs you a lot. Enter hours each, not the gang total — if you enter the gang total by mistake, every labour figure in the tool is multiplied by the size of the gang. The entry preview shows the multiplication as you type so you can catch it.

One entry covers one trade. Where several trades were on site on the same day, add a second entry for the same date for each additional trade — but record the day-level facts (weather, ground, the delay and its hours) on one entry only, or that lost time will be counted twice. The tool counts days by distinct date, so extra entries for the same day do not inflate the day count.

Plant hours are recorded as a plain total for the day across all items of plant. They are deliberately not added to labour hours: they are a different quantity and mixing them produces a number that means nothing.

Delays, causes and hours lost

Two separate figures record lost time. Hours lost to weather is the time the weather itself took. Hours lost to the delay is the time taken by whatever you selected as the delay cause. Where the cause is weather, these two describe the same lost time, so the tool counts it once:

The delay chart attributes hours the same way, so the bars always add up to the total on the tiles. Weather hours recorded on a day whose delay cause is something else are attributed to weather, not to that cause.

Hours lost are expressed as days using the standard working hours setting:

Set that to the shift actually worked on this site. If the gang works ten-hour days, five hours lost is half a day, not most of one.

Record the hours honestly, at the level you can defend. Hours lost across the gang and hours lost per operative are different numbers; pick one convention, say which you used in the note, and never change it mid-diary. Where you genuinely do not know, write what you do know in the delay description and leave the hours blank rather than inventing a figure — a blank is defensible, an invented number is not.

One cause per day is a real limitation. Where a day had two independent causes, record the larger against the cause field, describe both in the delay text, and note the split. The tool cannot split it for you.

Instructions and their references

Recording an instruction and its reference on the day it was given is often worth more than any other entry in the diary. Verbal instructions on site are normal, and they are exactly what is denied later. An entry saying who told you, when, where, what they said and what you did about it — written the same day — is very hard to argue with.

Write the instruction in full, then put the reference in its own field as soon as you have one. Where you do not have one, the tile and the preview say so, and the delay log shows "Yes — no reference". Treat that as a daily action list: chase the written confirmation while everybody still remembers the conversation.

An instruction is not the same thing as a delay. A day can carry an instruction with no time lost at all, and it should still be recorded. The delay log lists days with lost time; the instruction tile counts every day with an instruction, whether or not anything was lost.

Daywork sheets

Record the sheet reference on the day the work is done, and the name and role of the person who signed it as soon as it is signed. The tool counts sheets with a reference but no signature and shows them on the "unsigned daywork" tile.

An unsigned daywork sheet is an unfinished job. Sheets get harder to sign every week that passes, because the person who saw the work moves on and their successor has no reason to agree to something they did not witness. Chase them while the work is still visible.

A signature usually means only that the person agrees the resources and hours shown were on site — not that the work was extra, and not that it will be paid. Say so on your sheets if that is what your contract provides, and do not treat a signature as agreement to anything more.

Gaps in the record

Gaps are read against whoever kept the diary. If nine consecutive Tuesdays are missing, the reasonable reading is not that nothing happened on Tuesdays — it is that the diary was written when it suited, and every entry in it is worth less as a result.

The "days recorded" tile counts distinct dates and tells you how many working days between your first and last entry have nothing written against them:

Whether weekends count as working days is a setting, because sites differ. Set it to match how the site actually operates. Where the site genuinely shut — holidays, a planned shutdown, a suspension — record the day anyway, with no labour on site and a note saying why. A recorded shutdown is a fact; a silent gap is a doubt.

What this tool will not tell you

It will not tell you whether you are entitled to more time or more money. That is not modesty — it is the point. Entitlement depends on your contract: which events are relieving events, what notice you must give, to whom, within what period, in what form, and what you must show to recover cost as well as time. Two contracts on two sites in the same street can reach opposite answers on identical facts.

What the diary does is establish the facts, contemporaneously and consistently, so that whoever assesses entitlement is working from a record rather than from recollection. Keep the record; take advice on the contract; and give any notice your contract requires separately and on time. Nothing in this tool notifies anyone of anything.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, headline figures, all four charts, the delay log, the labour summary by trade, the full diary and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate or archive it.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the whole diary — a report that quietly excludes half the period is worse than no report.

Consider printing to PDF at the end of every month and storing it with the date in the filename. It is a cheap, dated snapshot, and it makes it easy to show that the record existed long before the argument did.

Saving your work

Diary entries, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. On a live site, export at least weekly and keep the exports. Export CSV gives you the diary for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen, together with the derived hours. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and totals it. It cannot tell whether the weather was recorded accurately, whether the cause of a delay was correctly identified, whether the hours lost are the right hours, or whether an instruction was ever actually given. Every figure it produces inherits the quality of the entries.

It is a record-keeping and calculation aid. It is not legal advice, not a contractual notice, not a claim, and not a substitute for the notices and records your contract requires. Whether any delay recorded here entitles you to time or money depends on that contract, and on what you did about it at the time.