Construction Daily Report Template and Site Diary

Is a site diary or daily report required?

There is no single rule for every English-speaking market, so check the contract first and the local regulations second. The record also goes by different names: site diary in the UK, Ireland and Australia, construction daily report or daily log in the US. On Canadian projects, use the term your contract uses.

CDM 2015 (SI 2015/51) sets duties for planning and managing health and safety on construction work, but we found no duty in it to keep a document called a site diary. Several things it does require overlap with a daily record: a construction phase plan and a health and safety file (regulation 12), site induction (regulations 13(4) and 15(9)(a)), an inspection of excavations at the start of every shift and after events that could affect them (regulation 22(4)), and a written report of such an inspection within 24 hours, kept on site until the work is complete and then for three months (regulation 24).

Beyond that, the site diary is a contract and evidence record. Whether your JCT or NEC contract, or the client's own conditions, ask for daily records, and who receives them, is a question for that document; we do not quote clauses here.

On US projects the construction daily report is a common project document. Whether it is required, and on which form, depends on the owner's contract and the contractor's own procedures; we have not reviewed federal or state rules on daily reports, so none is cited. The same goes for Australian and Irish projects: the contract and the project procedures decide.

How to keep a daily report that holds up later

Fill it in on the day, at the end of the shift, while names, hours and times are still known. A record written up days later carries less weight when a delay or a daywork claim is disputed.

Work through the sheet in order: weather in the morning, at noon and in the evening; one line per crew with company, trade, number of workers and hours; equipment with working and idle hours; then every delay with its reason, the number of workers it stopped and for how long. Add the work performed by location, deliveries, visitors and instructions received, and any incident or near miss.

Keep descriptions factual. "Rain 10:00 to 12:30, slab pour stopped, 14 workers stood down" is more useful than "bad weather". Record each instruction with the name of the person who gave it.

Sign the report and, where your contract asks for it, have it countersigned by the client representative or the supervising engineer. File the signed copy and keep the spreadsheet; the weekly summary sheet of the template adds up the days, so you can see the man-hours since the start of the site.

The calculator runs in your browser: names, hours and notes you type are not sent to us, and the Excel file stays on your computer.

Man-hours, utilization and common mistakes

Gross man-hours are the sum of workers times hours for each crew. Lost man-hours are the affected workers times the length of each delay. Effective hours are gross minus lost, and utilization is effective divided by gross. In the worked example, 158 gross hours less 35 lost hours leave 123 effective hours, a utilization of 77.85 %.

Utilization here is a site record, not a productivity measure: it says how much of the paid time was available for work, not how much work was done in it.

• More affected workers than workers on site: the calculator stops with an error, because the lost hours would belong to nobody.
• A delay longer than the longest shift of the day: also an error; split a delay that runs into overtime into separate lines.
• Two delays that stop the same people: allowed, since each line is checked on its own, but all delays together cannot lose more hours than were worked.
• No workers entered: man-hours are zero and utilization is shown as n/a instead of a misleading 0 %.
• Equipment hours are machines times hours and are kept apart from labor; idle equipment does not reduce labor utilization.

Questions about construction daily reports