Site Diary

The site diary is the daily record of what happened on the job: the weather, who was there, what plant was on site, what was delivered, what held things up. It is dull to keep and invaluable to have, because it is the document a delay claim, an insurance question or a dispute is argued from years later.

Every organisation on the project keeps its own entry for a day. The host's entry and the subcontractor's entry sit side by side rather than one overwriting the other.

Creating an entry

Open Site Diary and choose Create.

Pick the date first. Teralo fetches that day's weather for the project's site address and fills in the condition, temperature, high, low, humidity and wind speed. Every field stays editable, because the forecast for a suburb is not always the weather on the site, and there is a notes field for the difference.

Set the hours type, which is one of Standard, Overtime, Weekend or Shutdown, and the start and end times. Where the day lost time, record it and say why in Lost Hours Reason, because that is the field somebody will look for.

General Notes is the plain summary of the day. Then work through the sections.

Sections

An entry is built from sections, and the project decides which are available. The full set is Notes, Equipment, Visitors, Deliveries, Safety Observations, Quantities, Delays, Waste and Programmed Work.

Most sections take multiple entries, each with its own location and its own attachments, so "concrete pour, Level 3, slab" and "formwork strip, Level 1" are two records rather than one paragraph.

Two sections fill themselves in part. Equipment offers the plant already recorded as on site for that date, and Visitors offers the workers signed in at the gate that day. Both still take a free-typed entry when the thing you are recording was not in either list.

Progress reports

Separately from the sections, an entry carries progress reports: worker count, hours worked, visitor count and a summary of output, recorded per organisation.

This is where labour numbers live. There is no labour section in the diary itself, which surprises people expecting one; the headcount belongs to the organisation reporting it, so it sits on that organisation's progress report.

Above all of them sits the daily summary, one per project per day, holding the totals across every organisation: headcount, hours worked, the hours type, the start and end of the working day, any lost hours and their reason, a weather summary and administrator notes. It is edited from the register by anybody holding the permission to manage the diary, and it is what a client report quotes rather than a stack of separate entries.

Submitting, approving and locking

Save an entry as a draft and keep working on it. Submit it when it is done.

Submitting sends it for review. The reviewer either approves it, which locks the entry so it can no longer be edited, or rejects it back to draft with a reason so it can be corrected and resubmitted.

Locked means locked, and that is the point of the record. A manager can unlock an approved entry back to draft where something genuinely has to be fixed, unless a workflow run is still active on it, and the unlock is written into the entry's own history alongside every other status change.

Reading the register

The register has three views. Calendar is the default and is the fastest way to spot a day nobody filled in. List is the ordinary register, filterable by status, submitter, weather or hours type. Gallery is every photo attached to a diary entry across the project, filtered by date range.

Teralo also tracks each person's run of on-time submissions, current and longest, which is a gentle way of making a daily habit visible.

What an entry pulls in

Open a saved entry and Teralo gathers the rest of that day for you: the workers who signed in, the permits that were active, the meetings held, and any incidents or observations raised. None of it is typed in twice. See Inductions, Permits and Observations.

Exports

Three exports come off the register, and two of them are not really about the diary at all.

The diary itself

A PDF over a date range you choose, which is what a monthly client report is built from.

The gate record for a period, with hours worked derived from each sign-in and sign-out pair.

The evacuation list

Everybody currently on site, as a PDF or a spreadsheet, with a reason recorded for the export and a choice of which personal details to include.

It is meant to be printed or opened at the muster point, so it is worth finding it once on a quiet day rather than for the first time during an evacuation.

SettingsHost only

Site Diary is configured under Project, then Tools, then Site Diary, and it has more settings that matter than most tools.

Enabled Sections chooses which of the nine sections appear on the form. Turn off what the project does not track; a form with four relevant sections gets filled in properly and a form with nine does not.

Working Days and Standard Working Hours set the pattern the project runs on, and the Submission Deadline says how many hours after the end of the working day an entry is still on time.

Submission Tracking is the accountability half. Turn on Require specific users to submit, nominate them, and set which days each of them is expected to submit. Teralo then tracks and alerts on missed days rather than leaving somebody to notice.

Weather Location Override is there for the project whose registered address is the site office in another suburb.

PermissionsHost only

Four permissions, in a deliberate ladder. Viewing entries, creating and submitting them, managing and approving them, and deleting them are all separate.

The one to think about is the gap between creating and approving. A subcontractor submitting their own day's record needs the first. The party signing that record off needs the second, and giving both to the same organisation means the daily record is being checked by the people who wrote it.

WorkflowsHost only

Site Diary binds a workflow per tool, on its Workflows tab, so a submitted entry can go through a review sequence rather than straight to a single approver. Approval through the workflow locks the entry exactly as a direct approval does.

See Binding a workflow to a tool and Approving and rejecting.