Site Reports: Overview

About Site Reports

A site report records what happened on a construction site in a given period, usually a day: who was there, what was done, what arrived, what the weather was, what went wrong and what was decided. Kept every day, the reports become the site diary, the continuous record of how the project progressed.

Site reports serve two readers. The project team reads them to see progress against the schedule. Lawyers and quantity surveyors read them years later, when a delay claim or a dispute turns on what actually happened on 14 March.

Where Site Reports Are Required

By contract. Many standard forms require the contractor to keep a daily record. In Germany the Bautagebuch is standard under VOB, in Austria the Bautagesbericht is required under ÖNORM B 2110, in the UK the site diary is standard practice under JCT and NEC.
By the client. Owners and developers ask for a weekly progress report with photos.
By the contractor for their own protection. A daily record of weather, workforce and obstructions is the evidence for an extension of time or a disruption claim.
By the site supervisor on the client's side. Their diary is the counterpart to the contractor's and often the two disagree.

Terminology


Term	What it means
Site report, daily report, daily log	The record of one day on site: attendance, activities, deliveries, weather, incidents, visitors, instructions received
Site diary, construction diary	The sequence of daily reports over the project. Sometimes a single running document, sometimes one document per day
Bautagebuch, Bautagesbericht	Germany, Austria, Switzerland. The daily construction report. In Austria the Bautagesbericht has a defined minimum content and is signed by both contractor and client's supervisor
Progress report	A periodic summary, usually weekly or monthly, of progress against the schedule, with photos, for the client
Progress documentation, Baufortschrittsdokumentation	The photographic record of the state of the works over time, often from fixed viewpoints
Regiebericht, Stundenbericht	Germany, Austria. The record of dayworks: hours and materials spent on work outside the contract, to be signed by the client before it can be invoiced
Site instruction	An instruction given on site by the client's representative, which has to be recorded because it may change scope, cost or time

What PlanRadar Covers

PlanRadar offers two ways to keep site reports, and many companies use both.

Project reports are PDF forms, filled on the phone or in the Webapp, submitted and then locked. You upload your own PDF form, for example your existing Bautagesbericht layout, and PlanRadar fills project name, date and user lists into it automatically. Photos and tickets can be attached. Once submitted, a project report cannot be changed. Project reports are available on Pro and Enterprise plans.
Tickets from a Site report form, one ticket per day. The day's data sits in fields that can be filtered, counted and charted: workforce numbers, weather, hours lost. Photos and the day's defects or instructions link to the ticket. The record is editable, and every edit is in the journal.

Progress photos over time are covered by SiteView, which records 360° walks of the site that can be compared side by side by date, and by ticket photos placed on the plan.

What PlanRadar does not do is write the report. Someone on site has to record what happened, every day, even on the days when nothing did. PlanRadar makes that take five minutes and makes the result impossible to lose.

Roles and Workflow

Roles


Role in the process	Typical job title	Where they work	What they do in PlanRadar
Set up the report	Project manager, office	Webapp, office	Creates the project report template or the Site report form and lists, sets up the weekly progress report
Write the daily report	Site manager, foreman, Bauleiter, Polier	Mobile app, on site	Fills the report at the end of each day with photos, attaches the day's tickets, submits
Countersign	Client's site supervisor, Örtliche Bauaufsicht, clerk of works	Mobile app or Webapp	Reads the report, disputes entries in comments, signs where the contract requires it
Read and report on	Project manager, client, quantity surveyor	Webapp	Follows progress, compiles the weekly report, pulls the diary for a claim

The client's supervisor can be a watcher, who sees all reports and tickets and can create ticket reports but change nothing, or an in-house user in the contractor's account if they have to countersign inside PlanRadar. Read more in User Types.

Workflow

The process runs in four stages: set up, record daily, review weekly, retrieve when needed.

Set up. The project manager decides between project report and ticket, or both, builds the template or form, and defines the weather, activity and trade lists.
Record daily. The site manager fills the day's report on the phone before leaving site: attendance per trade, weather, activities, deliveries, obstructions, instructions, photos. The day's defects and instructions are attached as tickets.
Review weekly. The project manager reads the week's reports, checks progress against the schedule, and sends the client the weekly progress report with photos and the SiteView comparison.
Retrieve. When a claim or dispute arises, the diary for the period is exported as PDF with photos, and the SiteView runs show the state of the works on each date.

Each stage is explained in Site Reports: Workflows in PlanRadar.

The Example in These Articles

A general contractor builds a supermarket with a car park over nine months. The site manager keeps a Bautagesbericht every working day as a project report from the company's own PDF form, and records the same day's key figures on a Site report ticket so that they can be charted. The client's site supervisor countersigns weekly. Once a week the site manager records a SiteView run along the same route around the building. When the steel delivery is three weeks late, the diary shows the days lost and the workforce that stood idle.

Where a decision could reasonably be made another way, a short note points out the alternative.

Planning Your Site Report Setup

Project Report, Ticket, or Both?


Approach	Use when	Keep in mind
Project report from your own PDF form	Your company or your contract has a fixed daily report layout, the report has to be signed and immutable, your team is used to the paper version	Familiar, guided, locked once submitted. The data inside is not filterable or chartable across days. Requires a Pro or Enterprise plan and Acrobat Pro or similar to prepare the PDF form
One ticket per day from a Site report form	You want to filter, count and chart: days lost to weather, workforce per trade per week, hours of downtime	Flexible and reportable. Editable, with every change in the journal. Ticket reports produce the PDF diary for any period. Available on every plan
Both	The contract needs the signed document and you also want the numbers	Two entries per day. Keep the ticket short: the numbers and the photos. Attach the day's ticket to the project report so the two are linked

What Goes into a Daily Report?

The contract or the ÖNORM often defines the minimum. A common set:

Date, weather and temperature. Weather from a list, so days lost to weather can be counted.
Attendance: number of workers per trade, as number fields, one per trade or one per company.
Activities carried out, as long text, and the areas they were carried out in.
Deliveries and plant on site.
Obstructions, delays and their cause, as a list plus text. This is the field a claim is built on.
Instructions received from the client, and visitors.
Incidents and near misses.
Photos of the day's progress.

Every value you may need to count later has to be a list or a number field. "Rain all day, 2 trades stood down" in a text field cannot be added up over nine months. Read more in Field Types.

How Are Photos Organised?

Progress photos are useless if nobody can find the one of the east elevation in week 12. Three ways to keep them findable, and they combine:

Photos attached to the day's report or ticket, so they are found by date.
Photos on tickets placed on the plan, so they are found by location. One ticket per fixed viewpoint, with a new photo added each week, gives a time series of the same view.
A SiteView run along the same route each week, so that any point of the site can be compared between any two dates. Read more in SiteView.

Who Signs, and When?

Where the contract requires the client's supervisor to countersign the daily report, decide how. A project report can carry a signature field in the PDF form and is locked on submission. A ticket can be signed with the Sign a Ticket function, which locks it. In the example, the supervisor signs the week's project reports on the site manager's tablet every Friday. Read more in Sign a Ticket and Create & Edit Project Report Templates.

Disagreements about an entry go into the comments, not into the report. The report says what the contractor recorded, the comment says what the supervisor disputes, and both are dated.

How Does the Daily Report Connect to Progress?

A diary tells you what happened. Progress against plan tells you whether it matters. If the project has a schedule in PlanRadar, link tickets to schedule phases and set their progress, so that the weekly report shows planned against actual. Import the schedule from Microsoft Project, Asta Powerproject or Primavera P6 rather than rebuilding it. Read more in Schedules and Import & Export a Schedule from/to Microsoft Project and Other Software.

What to Avoid

Skipping quiet days. A gap in the diary is read as a day nobody can account for.
Writing the week's reports on Friday. Dates and details drift, and the journal shows when the entry was actually made.
Numbers in text fields. They cannot be added up.
Photos without a location. Place progress photos on the plan or use fixed viewpoints.
Editing a submitted report to settle a dispute. Use a comment. The original entry is what has evidential value.
Reports only in one person's head or phone. The site manager who leaves takes the diary with them unless it is in PlanRadar.

AI Support for Site Reports


Step	How AI helps	Feature
Build the Site report form	Turn your existing daily report template into a ticket form	Create and Edit Forms with AI
Write the day's entry	Dictate activities and obstructions in the car before leaving site	Fill Ticket Fields with Voice
A day's report is saved without photos or attendance	An agent flags incomplete reports the same evening	Ticket Completeness Agent (template)
Compile the weekly report	Generate a summary of the week's tickets as a starting point for the client report	Generate an AI Project Summary
Find the evidence for a claim	Search in plain language, for example "days with rain and fewer than 10 workers in March", and save the filter	Search for Tickets with AI Assistant, Create Ticket Filters with AI Assistant
Check what the contract says	Ask the contract what notice period applies to a delay, directly from the document	Get Document Insights with AI Assistant
Produce the diary PDF	Build and edit the ticket report template for the diary with AI	Create & Edit Ticket Report Templates with AI

An AI agent only ever creates a ticket, a comment or an email. It cannot write or change a report. Read more in Create & Manage Your AI Agents.

Steps to Keep Site Reports in PlanRadar

Site Reports: Workflows in PlanRadar explains each stage: set up the project report template or the Site report form, record the daily report on site, review and send the weekly progress report, and retrieve the diary for a claim.

Additional Possibilities

Record a weekly SiteView run along a fixed route and compare any two dates side by side. Read more in SiteView and View & Navigate 360° Images.
Fill the report without signal and sync later. Read more in Working Offline.
Attach the day's defect and instruction tickets to the project report, so the report and the work items are linked. Read more in Attach Tickets to Project Reports.
Export the diary for any period as PDF with photos, or as Excel for the quantity surveyor. Read more in Ticket Reports and Create Excel Templates for Exporting Tickets.
Record dayworks as tickets with hours and materials and have the supervisor sign them, so the Regiebericht is invoiceable. Read more in Sign a Ticket.
Chart workforce per week, days lost to weather and hours of downtime in Statistics. Read more in Statistics.
Send the weekly progress report automatically with PlanRadar Connect, for example every Friday to the client's distribution list.

Updated September 11, 2026