Why every subcontractor should keep their own site records

Ask a subcontractor where the site records for their package are and a remarkable number will tell you the main contractor keeps them. That is a rational answer, right up until the day it is the main contractor telling you your gang was four men and not seven.

The party holding the record controls the account of what happened. If you do not keep your own, you have outsourced your version of events to the organisation most likely to be on the other side of the argument.

Why the main contractor’s record is not your record

This is not an accusation of bad faith. Even a scrupulous main contractor produces records that are wrong for your purposes, for three structural reasons.

They record what they can see. A site manager running eight packages records your trade at the resolution they need, which is coarser than the resolution you need. “Groundworks on site” is a perfectly adequate entry for them and useless to you.

They record their causes, not yours. When your work is disrupted by another trade running late, the main contractor’s diary is unlikely to frame it that way, because that framing is against their interest with the employer.

You cannot get at it when you need it. The moment a dispute crystallises, informal access to the other side’s records stops. Disclosure may get you there eventually, in a process, at cost. “I will ask them for the diary” is not a plan.

The moments your own records decide

Four situations, all common, all decided on records:

Payment and applications. Valuation arguments are resolved by evidence of what was actually installed and when. A pay less notice disputing your measure is answered with records, not with recollection.

Delay and disruption to your package. If you are delayed by late access, late information or another trade, your entitlement depends on showing the sequence you actually experienced. Nobody else records that from your position.

Variations and daywork. The instruction given verbally on a Tuesday morning is worth what your record of it is worth.

Defects and back-charges. When damage to your finished work is attributed to you months later, photographs taken at completion of your section are the entire defence. This one alone pays for a records habit.

The counter-argument, and why it is wrong

The usual objection is reasonable: a subcontractor running six packages with a supervisor who is also on the tools cannot resource a records function. Main contractors have document controllers. You have a van.

True, and it is exactly why the answer is not “keep better diaries”. Told to write more, a stretched supervisor writes less, then nothing. Any records policy that depends on finding an extra half hour at the end of the day will fail, and blaming the supervisor for that is missing where the fault sits.

The workable answer is to capture what is already being produced. Your supervisor is already photographing the completed section, already sending a voice note about the access that was not ready, already confirming the delivery. That material is the record. It is simply sitting on a phone in no order and with no durability.

The per-seat problem

There is a commercial reason subcontractor records are worse than they should be, and it is not laziness. Most construction software is priced per user.

Per-seat pricing produces a predictable behaviour: you buy the minimum number of licences, give them to the people who most need them, and leave everyone else off. On a subcontract package that means the supervisor has an account and the four people who actually witness what happens do not.

You then get a record with structural holes in it, and the holes are precisely where the evidence was. It is a false economy that looks like prudence on the monthly bill.

This is why Construction Metric is priced per site rather than per user, with unlimited people including your own subcontractors. Not generosity: charging per head is what puts holes in a record, and a record with holes does not do the job it exists for.

What to keep, minimum viable version

If you do nothing else, keep these five, every working day, for your scope only:

• Who you had on site, by name or by trade and number. This is the backbone of every disruption argument you will ever run.
• What you completed, by location. Specific enough that someone off site could find it.
• What stopped you, with the time and the cause. Late access, missing information, another trade, weather.
• Anything you were told to do differently, by whom, with the time.
• Photographs at completion of each section, dated and located. These are your defence against back-charges.

Five items. None require prose. All of them are things your team already says out loud during the day.

The summary

Keeping your own records is not about distrust of the main contractor. It is about the fact that a record kept from your position, at the time, is the only thing that puts you on equal footing when the account of what happened is contested.

The subcontractors who get paid without a fight are, almost without exception, the ones who can produce the day in question on request. That capability is cheap to build and very expensive to lack.

See how the record builds itself from your existing group chat, or read a sample daily record.