After 14 months of paper logs, I finally see the before and after with digital daily reports

I used to spend every Friday night adding up hours from paper timesheets for our crew of 9. Last November I switched to a digital daily log in our construction management software, and the difference is unreal. Now the foreman enters hours on his phone at the end of each day, and I just pull the report Monday morning. It took about 3 weeks for him to stop forgetting, but now we have accurate data for every job, including the Martin St. remodel that ran 6 weeks over. The best part is I can see productivity per task now, which we never had before. Has anyone else made this switch and noticed a big change in how you track labor costs?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela_grant24d ago

Not to nitpick, but the productivity per task thing is a bit trickier than it looks, since the foreman's phone entries still depend on how he breaks up the day. Paper logs had the same flaw, just slower to catch. The real win is catching those small errors while the week is still fresh, not the fancy data itself.

ryan_gibson8424d ago

The "small errors while the week is still fresh" part is spot on, but I think you're being a little too generous to paper logs on one point. Those old paper sheets had a way of getting "cleaned up" or rewritten by the end of the week, so the error wasn't always slow to catch, sometimes it just never got caught at all. The phone entries at least leave a timestamp, so you can see where the foreman stretched a task or lumped two jobs together. That alone makes the data messier but also more honest.