Daily Observation Report Template: Fill & Download for Free

Hey!Here’s a detailed overview of what daily construction reports are, what the purpose is of daily reports, what goes in them and how to make them admissible for court and some best practices.Construction daily reports document all on-site work done for a construction project in a given day.They typically include:Weather conditionsNumber of working hoursType of work performedSafety observationsPotential delaysCompleted tasksWhat’s the purpose of a construction daily report?By documenting the construction project activities, reports provide transparency, reduce communication issues and safety risks, and protect you during lawsuits.Here are the benefits in more detail:They reduce delays and other issuesMost of the time, construction projects fail because of bad communication and collaboration. Since many people and companies are involved in projects, there’s a constant risk of misunderstandings, mistakes, and delays.Daily construction reports can reduce these by documenting and sharing observations made during site visits. Not only do they help stakeholders understand what needs to get done, they also allow you to catch small issues before they grow bigger.They improve customer relationsWhen it comes to your client, daily reports help you in several ways:They create transparency for your actions.They allow you to demonstrate your progress.They help the client understand your process.Your client, for example, may ask you why HVAC is taking so long to install. Daily reports would give them a window into the duration of each individual step, causing them to increase their patience.If you send daily or weekly reports that demonstrate what you’ve been doing (including materials used, hours spent, etc.), the customer will also feel confident you’re doing a good job.Translation: They’ll be happy to quickly pay whatever invoices you send their way.They help you manage your timeAs with any kind of reporting, construction progress reports allow you to get a better general view on your project and its progress, issues, risks, evolution, etc.If you’re not creating regular site reports, you’re driving blind — and won’t know if you’re heading in the right direction (let alone whether you’ll arrive on time!).They can settle disputesIf a client or general contractor disputes an invoice, your daily construction documentation will be invaluable. It could verify the number of hours worked, the materials used, supplier delays, or weather conditions.That’s why you should always strive to include detailed documentation, photos, and client signatures on every report. If need be, you might even be able to use them in court (more on that below).Even if you have a great relationship with your customer, don’t assume disputes and court claims are out of the realm of possibility. Your team could change, your customer’s management could change — and at that point, any verbal agreements will be moot. Without daily reports, new team members won’t know what was agreed upon or discussed, which could lead to conflicts.In the end, daily construction reports are all about maintaining quality and managing risk. When you make daily reporting a priority, you’ll reduce unplanned costs, lower safety risks, and keep your project on the right track.What goes into a daily report?Since they only include what you need, daily reports all contain different building blocks. Here are the most common elements:Project information: The project name and number, address, report date and author, etc. Adding this information helps managers, customers, and other parties immediately see which project goes with which report. It’ll also help when you need to look up an old report in your archive.Weather conditions: Changes to the weather, such as rain, snow, or intense sun, can cause delays (e.g. when pouring concrete slabs), impact worker efficiency, and increase the potential for accidents.Labor time spent: The workers on site, the number of hours they worked, and what they did.Equipment used and received: Which major materials were used or received, and which weren’t received (and are causing delays).Tasks in progress and tasks completed: Which tasks are in progress (e.g. slab pouring 70% complete) and which tasks are done (and can be documented with photos).Potential risks, issues, delays: Anything worth noting, plus areas where managers or the customer could intervene (e.g. a delay of another contractor that prevents you from starting your portion). Don’t forget to include photos so everyone can see the exact issue.Safety observations and accidents: All safety risks and observations, again with photos. (When accidents happen, the daily report can protect you from litigation.) In the case of accidents, record who was involved, when and where it occurred, how it impacted the work, and any photos of the event.How to make your daily report admissible for courtAs noted above, daily construction reports are often the most important piece of evidence used in court during a contract dispute. But the problem is they’re not always admissible.In addition to having your daily reports signed by the client, you should also follow this advice from Corwin & Corwin law firm:“The most common ground for admissibility of job reports (often the only ground) is that the reports are regularly kept business records of the party who offers them as evidence… To avoid tripping on any of these evidentiary requirements at trial, assign a supervisor or foreman who is on site to fill in the report form each day.At the end of each week (or at regular intervals) collect the reports from each foreman and file them by project at your office. Make sure there is a report for each day you were on site, and that all are complete and accurate. If there are questions or gaps, address them immediately.”Best practices for creating daily construction reportsWhether you’re using an old-school notebook or a nifty new app, there are certain best practices you should follow for your daily construction reports:Provide sufficient detail: Too often, daily reports are drafted noting the date, the weather, and a broad description of the work being performed. This isn’t sufficient for properly communicating with other parties, or for disputes or court claims. Don’t forget that progress reports are supposed to document what happens on the project every day — and not only when problems arise.File reports as early as possible: Memories fade quickly. The shorter the time between events and notation, the more accurate the reports will be. By using an app, you’ll be able to document observations as soon as you make them.Report delays in detail: Record when activities get delayed or stopped, plus the reasons why (e.g. due to weather or an accident). Make sure you record each day of the delay; if you only note a delay’s start date, it’ll look like it only lasted one day.Get it signed: Getting construction site reports signed by a client, manager, or other responsible party increases their value. To preserve the integrity of the reporting, don’t make any changes once it’s signed.Use a checklist: Checklists reduce the risk of mistakes, increase the likelihood everything will get documented, and free up your mental RAM. So use your app’s checklist feature to make a list of what should be in each daily report.Keep it simple: Make sure your report is readable by using common language and including ample pictures. Don’t use specialist terms; just stick to a concise and clear description that anyone can understand.How to use reports to improve your servicesJust like in any other industry, one of the goals of reporting is to understand how your company or project is doing — and to use that information to boost future performance.You might, for example, include manpower details — like trades and hours — into your daily report. Then, along with progress data, you could use this information to track the performance of your team.By keeping daily records of work progress, you’ll gain clearer insight on ongoing projects as well as improve future processes.Daily report example and templateReady to see a construction daily report in action?We created a simple checklist in ArchiSnapper that has an overview of the items to review:FYI: You can download this daily report template here and upload it into your ArchiSnapper account from here.Using this checklist, project managers, foremen, or superintendents can use their mobile device to create a comprehensive site report, even adding pictures and sketches, assignees, dates, PDF annotations, etc.When they finish, the daily report could look like this:Click here if you’d like to see a video of how we used the ArchiSnapper app to create this report.If you’re not yet ready to use an app like ArchiSnapper for your daily reports, we’ve also drafted a construction daily report template (Excel) you can download instead.Whether you use an app, a notebook, or an Excel document, the important thing is to always create construction daily reports. So you can reduce delays, keep your customer informed, settle disputes …I hope this information is useful!Jerry

Thank you for the A2A.I don’t think so.But what we are seeing is a result of “The Law of Unintended Consequences”[1] .Process:Quora knows that good-quality questions are rarer than good-quality answers.Quora knows that the platform depends on there being enough good-quality questions around, because these are likely to elicit good-quality answers, and people generally use the platform to read such answers.Quora observes that a lot of writers of good-quality answers, maybe like myself (*blushes*) do not ask many questions.Lightbulb moment! Incentivise such answer-writers to ask questions by paying them to do so! Pretty much cost neutral: if we have great questions, we get great answers which result in advertising views, paying us money! We can siphon off, say, 1% of this extra revenue, and return it as payment to the writers of such questions!Intended Consequence:Win-win! More good-quality questions, more good-quality answers, bigger Quora audience, more advertising revenue! Ching-ching!And we’ll give it a name! The Quora Partner Program! (See what we did there?)Problems:Quora does not have enough staff to vet who will receive invitations appropriately.Quora does not have enough staff to monitor “Partners” and check that they are, in fact, producing “good-quality” questions.And Quora does not have enough incentive to withdraw invitations from those reported for writing cynical insincere questions as it is more (short-sightedly) focused on slight increase in revenue over long-term platform viability.Unintended Consequence:Some “partners” generate scripts or templates to generate spam questions by the bucketload. Some partners ask insincere questions on an industrial scale, not caring about not acknowledging responses because their eye is on potential income.Result:Spam questions proliferate. The overall quality of Quora, on which depends its survival as a viable platform, is diluted. Writers of good-quality answers begin to leave, further diluting the overall quality of the platform.Possible Solutions which will Make Situation Worse:Set up a “Daily Target” to encourage more questions! Ten a day! (Good-quality question-writers don’t need a target. Low-quality question spammers are probably generating ten questions a minute.)Introduce an “Invite a Friend” feature so QPP members can choose good-quality writers to add to the program! (Good-quality question writers will be very chary about taking such action. Low-quality question writers? Not so much. And who are they going to invite? More spammers!)OK then: let’s pay people to answer questions too! (Some people generate template insincere answers. Answers become short and unfocused. Good-quality question answers get lost in the morass. More good-quality writers leave.)Solutions that would Improve the Situation, but are Unlikely to be Implemented:Make the “Daily target” a daily limit of ten questions a day.Act on reports of spam questions by removing “partners” from the program immediately if the report is upheld on moderation.Enforce the QPP policies published in May 2019: Policies for the Partner ProgramStop contacting Quorans with enticing statements about how much some (mythical?) “partners” have made this month.Or, more cheaply and comprehensively:Scrap the QPP.Footnotes[1] Unintended Consequences - Econlib

A2A: No. Not by a long shot. - It’s not even a close contest or a fair one.Currently, Mr. Musk holds the following Official titles at those 2 companies.Tesla - CEOHere is the key excerpt from his official ‘Bio write-up’ from Tesla’s Corporate Governance doc’s about what his formal role at Tesla is…“Elon oversees the company's product strategy -- including the design, engineering and manufacturing of electric vehicles and battery products for consumers.”The key word here is “oversees”.Note: He used to also hold the role of “Chairman of the Board of Directors”, but due to legal punitive action taken by the SEC against him, he no longer holds that title. Although that title is not an engineering related role.SpaceX - CEO and CTOHere is the key excerpt from his official ‘Bio write-up’ from SpaceX.Elon Musk leads Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), where he oversees the development and manufacturing of advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth orbit.Again…the key word here is “oversees”.His roles are Executive CEO and CTO roles:Those executive C-Level roles are the top-most Senior Executive roles in the company. No other day-to-day operational role sits above or exceeds those roles in operational seniority, responsibility & accountability. They are also full-time permanent roles. So, you can bet he’s very busy, being explicitly ‘committed to and fully engaged in’ his Executive capacity of CEO and CTO; 1st-and-foremost. - That’s CEO x 2 and CTO x 1.If he wasn’t, the Board of Directors would be somewhat disappointed in him and look to appoint someone else to hold and execute those C-Level titles/roles.More importantly, those titles (CEO & CTO) are not fancy hollow honorary titles that are bestowed upon him for looks and good measure, where he doesn’t have to do any real Executive work. (What real work do CEO’s and CTO’s do anyway?). - Where he can wander off during the day and do other more important stuff, like…designing & engineering & building & testing cool technology inventions within his own 2 hands. - Like engineers do.Finally, his titles of CEO and CTO are not hands-on ‘Engineering explicit’ titles (although CTO can be in some companies, I don’t believe it is at SpaceX). So, it’s rather difficult to see how he’d be the “Best Engineer” at either of those 2 companies based on the primary roles that he has both a formal & fiduciary responsibility to. - FIRST ! and then being a part-time engineer in his “spare time”. - SECOND.On a side-note: the 100’s of Wikipedia editors who created, edited & nurture his official Wikipedia page (1000’s of times on his behalf) actually list his occupation as “Entrepreneur, engineer & philanthropist”. - My guess is that ‘engineer’ is more of an historical artifact on his Wikipedia page than an actual reflection of his current daily occupation.His Engineering work at Tesla and SpaceXTesla & SpaceX seems to be quite cagey (officially) about what Mr. Musk’s formal roles are on a day-to-day basis with respect to the functional engineering activities that he is physically & personally engaged in. Both companies seem to not want to reveal or disclose any deep intimate details about the tangible & material engineering related duties & tasks that he physically does, owns, runs, works on or manages on a daily basis. - yet both companies squeeze intergalactic levels of social media mileage out of the fanboy generated fantasy hype of the mysterious legend that Elon Musk is an actual engineer and not a prosaic CEO.That being said, the opposite it true on Twitter, Quora and in Thousand’s of unofficial SpaceX and Tesla websites. There, you’ll find a LOT of fluffy fabricated convoluted elaborate storytelling about the marvelous & astounding engineering feats of wonder that he personally does on a day-to-day basis that have propelled Tesla & SpaceX to glory, His engineering capabilities are truly mystical. - most of the fairy tales are untrue and infatuated fanboy whimsy.If they were true…and you were to compute the time, effort & energy (in man-hours per day) that it would take for him to be personally engaged in all those fictional engineering jobs/roles/tasks & fantastical engineering accomplishments…a normal person would be holding down 5 engineering jobs and be working 100 hours per 24 hour day window. Now add into that calculus his 2 x CEO roles and his 1 x CTO role and you’re clocking in at 8 jobs & 150+ hours of physical work in a single 24 hour day. - clearly not possible, (even for a super human Iron Man like him) to achieve that.You could also ask the question…“If he does do actual engineering work at Tesla and SpaceX?, then”…is he spending hours sketching up concepts and designs for new innovative features, components & parts for cars and rockets…and then spending more hours pounding his designs into 3D CAD Parametric Design modeling systems and running virtual tests and simulations on them to prove their viability and effectiveness. - and many more hours/days finely tweaking, tuning & optimizing the small nuances of his design. After that, is he spending more countless hours crafting and fine tuning 3D Printer machine models & data files & uploading them to 3D Metal Sinterning printers, producing his own physical parts/components and post-processing them with his own hands. Then taking his personal tools and fabricating & assembling all the parts into a final First Article unit. Then sitting down at a rocket engine (or an EV car) and attaching his prototype parts by his own hands into a complete sub-system. Or better yet, cranking up an MIG, TIG welder, Plasma-Arc or Tungsten-Arc welder and welding his own parts into life and into some other larger prototype system that he’s been personally building or some bigger engineering team has been building as a project. Or maybe prototyping/templating & hacking on code, compiling code, testing code, debugging code. Setting up, deploying and running A/B tests on new coded features (that he himself wrote) and tested with cohorts of users. Pulling and wrangling data from his test cohorts outputs. Writing & running data-science code, tweaking ML/AI algorithms and training models to crunch through data to do statistical analysis on the mountains of data & results to gain inference’s and insights on the experiment outputs of his prototypes so that he can start all over again by feeding all that data & results into a simulation to refine his code or his part prototype one more time.Oh you mean like this…NO. He doesn’t do that. - He’s not that kind of engineer.He’s actually somewhat of an honorary engineer and is given a very large ‘benefit of the doubt’ (by a lot of people) that he holds enough engineering acuity to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with real rocket science engineers & chemical & electrical engineers who do real hard-core engineering stuff. - who knows if he actually does have/hold enough real engineering qualifications & acumen?we do know that he’s read a lot of books on the subject. So he may be very good at ‘Engineering theory on paper’.we also know from many interviews that he’s publicly said: [quote: Before Tesla, I’d never made physical stuff.”] - So he’s inexperienced in the craft of hands-on engineering.Real engineers at those companies do real tangible material engineering work.He’s not spending his famous 15 minutes blocks of time (that his multiple admins schedule his executive C-Level day by)…doing those hard-core engineering things.He spends his time doing high-level CEO & CTO executive stuff.Guiding engineers to consider thinking about certain obscure problems that are pressing or as yet unseen & unobserved by the market or customers but are prescient observations that he’s correlated through deep matrixed barnstorming thought with other trusted engineers. Or he’s motivating leaders to investigate certain new technology concepts & paradigms that are trending in certain tangential or adjacent industries that nobody see’s as relative & correlated to his vision (yet) and pushing eager engineers to figure out if there is some innovative way for alternative technologies/approaches to be applied to the problem-space of rockets and EV cars, batteries, rocket engines, electric engines etc, etc. Pushing peers and direct reports to ‘fail faster’ by prototyping ideas in innovative low-cost ways that take less resources, less time and get to a ‘fast answer’ with a direction-ally accurate first-cut assessment (with supporting facts, proof & data) that he can leverage to make a quick informed go-no-go decision on that gives the company an large operational execution advantage over its competitors. - before his competitors even now they’ve moved in a different direction, again!These are the kind of ‘synthetic executive engineering tasks’ that he is intimately involved with on a day to day basis. - Engineering thought & execution leadership. - This is what’s meant by the fluffy words of… “Overseeing product strategy, development & manufacturing” - Not actual engineering hands-on hammering stuff.Not a CEO like this…and more a CEO like this…And that’s what you’d expect from a CEO & CTO of a company that makes Rockets and EV cars. - You don’t expect him to be welding stuff.and most of his fanatical fanboys know this. Yet, they don’t want to think about the cold boring truth of his executive roles or believe that he’s just a regular C-Level executive CEO & CTO first…(albeit a modern dynamic one), doing standard executive leadership stuff every day. - but he is. That’s just the facts of being CEO and CTO.The best engineer at SpaceX and Tesla are…the engineers that report directly to Mr. Musk daily. His Senior engineering leadership staffthe engineers that, if something needs to be done or a decision needs to be made and Mr. Musk isn’t around to make the decision or o.k. it…then everyone naturally goes to ‘Person X’ for the decision - (that guy).are the engineers that Mr. Musk himself spends the most amount of time hanging out with - (like Tom Mueller at SpaceX) : Tom Mueller - Wikipediaand are the engineers that Mr. Musk privately thinks of as his go-to-guys for when he really needs something to be done, now & be done right & be done with exacting technical engineering precision the 1st time. With credibility.are the engineers that Mr. Musk immediately goes to when he doesn’t know something, or he doesn’t how something works or he doesn’t know why something works the way it does. - (as strange as it may seem to some of his fanboys that…he doesn’t know everything).So, realistically no. Mr. Musk isn’t the best engineer at SpaceX or Tesla.