A foreman daily log template that holds up nine months later

Almost every daily log template you can download is a GC’s form. It asks for the things a general contractor needs to roll up across twenty subs, which is not the same as the things that will save you in a dispute.

A subcontractor’s log has one job: to be the document that proves what your crew did, when, with how many people, and what stopped them. That document gets read exactly once — in a room, nine months later, next to somebody else’s version of the same day.

Here is what it needs to contain, and what makes an entry worthless.

The entry that proves nothing

Start with the failure, because almost everyone has a folder full of it.

Tuesday. Worked on Building B. Crew on site. Good day.

That entry establishes that you had a truck there. It cannot tell you or anyone else: how many people, for how many hours, in what area, what they completed, who else was in their way, or whether the superintendent told them to stand down at ten in the morning. The record exists. The evidence does not.

Six months later the question will not be “were you there.” It will be “were you delayed, by whom, and how many hours did it cost you.” A log that cannot answer the second question is filing, not documentation.

The eleven fields that earn their place

Each of these is here because it answers a question somebody asks later. If a field on your template does not, cut it — every extra field is one more reason the log gets written on Friday for the whole week.

1. Job and date. One log per job per day, and only one. Two half-filled logs for the same Tuesday is the exact condition in which a daily log stops being evidence, because now the other side gets to pick which version to read.

2. Weather and temperature. Pick from a list rather than typing. “Overcast” chosen from a dropdown is searchable; “kinda cloudy on and off” is not. And on anything weather-sensitive — pours, coatings, cold-weather protection, roofing — the temperature at the time of work is the whole argument.

3. Work summary. The one free-text field that genuinely matters, and the one the office should actually read. Two or three sentences in the specific: what scope, what area, what got completed. “Hung and taped levels 3 and 4 east, started layout on 5” is worth more than a paragraph of generalities.

4. Work areas and phases. Which part of the building, and which phase of your own work. This is what later lets you say the rough-in on floor four took eleven days instead of six, in terms both your office and the GC recognize. It also tags the hours to the part of the job they were spent on, which is where cost-code reporting comes from.

5. Labor: hours per worker. Not a headcount. Names and hours. A headcount cannot be reconciled with payroll, cannot be costed, and cannot support a productivity claim. Hours per person per job per day is the atom of everything downstream.

6. Delay, with its cause from a fixed list. This is the single highest-value field on the form, and the one most templates get wrong by leaving it as free text.

The cause needs to come from a short list — weather, material, labor, access, GC direction, inspection — because the cause is what decides who pays for the day. “Slow day” is not an answer. “Access — stair tower not turned over” is a claim. One is a note; the other is a line in a time-impact argument.

7. Material delivered or installed. What arrived and what went in. This is how a material-driven delay gets proven, and how an overrun gets a record behind it instead of a theory.

8. Other trades in your area. Who else was working where you needed to be. On a congested job this is the backbone of every interference and stacking-of-trades claim you will ever make, and nobody writes it down until it is too late.

9. Sub or lump-sum crews. If you have crews on the job who are not on your payroll, record the company, the headcount and the area. A day with twelve people on it should read as twelve people.

10. Safety incidents and visitors. Near misses, incidents, and who came on site — inspectors, the owner’s rep, the GC’s safety officer. Both get asked about later with a specificity that surprises people.

11. Photos. Three to five a day, each one of something specific: the condition that blocked you, the work you completed, the damage you found. A photo with a timestamp ends more arguments than a paragraph does. Photos of nothing in particular end none.

Four habits that matter more than the form

A good template filled in badly is worse than a plain one filled in well.

Write it on the day. A week reconstructed on Friday afternoon is four days of guessing, and it will not survive being read next to another company’s log — because the weather will be wrong, and the person reading it will notice.

Be specific about blame on the day nobody is angry yet. The best time to write “stair tower not turned over, crew of four stood down 2 hours” is the morning it happens, when it is a neutral fact. The same sentence written after the claim is filed reads as reconstruction, because it is.

Have somebody in the office read them. A log nobody opens is a log whose gaps are discovered at the worst possible moment. Reading yesterday’s logs over coffee takes ten minutes and is the only time a thin entry is cheap to fix. This is why the useful workflow is draft, then submitted, then reviewed — not a folder.

Tie the log to the paperwork of the same day. If the field did extra work on Thursday, Thursday’s log, Thursday’s hours and the T&M ticket should all point at each other. A ticket with a corroborating log behind it is a very different conversation from a ticket on its own.

The template, as a form

If you are building this in a notebook, a spreadsheet or a form today, this is the order that works in a truck. Fast, boring fields first; the thinking fields in the middle; photos last because they are the easiest.

1. Job, date, foreman
2. Weather, temperature
3. Hours per worker (the roster, pre-filled, with hours beside each name)
4. Areas and phases worked
5. Work summary — two or three specific sentences
6. Delay? Yes or no. If yes: cause from the list, hours lost, who or what
7. Material delivered or installed
8. Other trades in your area
9. Sub or lump-sum crews — company, headcount, area
10. Safety incidents, visitors
11. Photos

Two design notes from watching this fail in practice. Pre-fill the roster, because typing names is where a foreman gives up. And make the delay question a yes-or-no gate, because an optional free-text delay field gets skipped on exactly the days that matter most.

Why the spreadsheet version eventually breaks

A shared workbook with a tab per week gets a long way, and it fails in four predictable places.

• It does not reach the field. The log gets texted to the office and retyped, so the hours exist twice and disagree.
• You cannot search it. “Every day we were delayed by access in Q2” is not a question a stack of weekly tabs can answer, and that is the only question you will ever urgently need to answer.
• There is no review step. Nobody can tell a submitted log from an abandoned one.
• The hours do not go anywhere. They get re-entered into payroll, and separately into a job-cost sheet, and now you have three sets of numbers.

How SubMark handles it

SubMark builds the log around the fact that writing it competes with going home.

• Most of the fields above are the form — weather from a list plus the temperature, work summary, delay with its cause from a fixed set (weather, material, labor, access, GC direction, inspection, other), work areas and phases, labor hours per worker, materials delivered or used, lump-sum sub crews with headcounts, safety incidents, visitors and photos. Other trades in your area go in the work summary; there is no separate field for them.
• One log per job per day is enforced, so there is never a second version of Tuesday.
• The phase names come from your trade pack, so a foreman is picking from his own trade’s vocabulary rather than a generic list.
• Labor entered here is not entered again. Those hours (with any time-clock hours) are the hours job costing uses, at the rate that applied on the day they were worked.
• Draft, submitted, reviewed is a workflow, so the office catches a thin entry the next morning.
• Field users are free and unlimited. This is the part that makes the whole thing work: the moment documentation costs a seat per person, somebody decides which three of your eight foremen log the job. That is a documentation gap designed into a company on purpose.

Two honest limits. Daily-log uploads are images — a marked-up PDF belongs with the drawings, not buried on one day’s entry. And the web app works well on a phone today, but a native field app with offline support is on the list and is not shipped, so a basement with no signal is still a basement with no signal.

Daily logs goes deeper on the module, and job costing covers where the hours end up. Two trades get more out of the log than anybody else: excavation and sitework, where the day’s loads and rain days are what settles a draw, and waterproofing, where the photographs taken before cover-up are the only proof the work was ever right.

Start with one job

Do not roll a new log out across nine jobs. Pick the job most likely to produce an argument — the congested one, the one with the GC who documents everything — and run the eleven fields on it for two weeks.

Then read the fortnight back. If you can reconstruct who was there, what they did, what stopped them and who caused it, on any day you pick at random, the template is working. If you cannot, the gap you just found is the gap that would have cost you the claim.