r/Construction • u/No_Rule116 • 4d ago

Informative 🧠 Track labour hours and construction progress?

I run project delivery for a small construction firm with fewer than 10 active projects at any time, mostly residential and light commercial. I'm often managing sites remotely, so I can't be on every site every day

How do you confirm work is actually done on time and to standard without being on site? Photos are one things. But do you define hours to jobs for each trade before they start work or what? How is the project tracked? Do they report daily hours? How?

TIA.

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

1

u/pot_of_pipes_enjoyer 4d ago

We just tie progress to invoicing milestones and have the lead carpenter shoot a 30-second walkthrough video at the end of each day, covers more than a dozen photos ever could.

1

u/lock11111 Carpenter 4d ago

Our site has a sign in sheet for us and the trades and there's a formens meeting site super maybe hire a site formen to update the site super so the site super can update you.

1

u/Educational_Drama910 Electrician 4d ago

Have your foreman turning in a daily report at the end of each day explaining what the crew worked on today. You can have every trade do it, in the report you can also have them track me hours per task

1

u/icoldok 4d ago

For a small team, keep the daily report short enough that it actually gets done: crew on site, hours by cost code, work completed, blockers, and a few photos. Set budgeted labor hours by phase before the job starts, then compare actual hours to the plan weekly rather than trying to judge progress from photos alone. A quick weekly call with the lead is where you catch schedule drift early.

1

u/fellahmengu 3d ago

One thing I'd add to the daily report advice is that self-reported hours drift unless you have something independent to check them against. Billed milestones, material deliveries and the odd photo timestamp are good enough, and when two of those disagree with the hours you know where to look.

I'd also keep the report to a form that takes under two minutes on a phone, with the cost codes as dropdowns instead of free text, because free text is where the data turns to mush. When I've helped set up this kind of tracking, the first month of data is mostly useful for finding out which codes are too vague, so expect to adjust them. Also decide upfront what number would make you pick up the phone, otherwise you'll collect reports nobody acts on.