Four weeks late with eleven recorded wet days is a different conversation
A job four weeks behind for no recorded reason looks like incompetence. The same job with eleven wet days in the diary is weather — and weather is usually an extension of time. The site diary is the cheapest insurance on a building job, and it only works if it is written on the day.
Available on the Builder plan
It is evidence, and it is the only evidence that will exist
It explains the programme
When the client asks why handover moved, a diary answers in specifics rather than impressions. Eleven wet days is a fact. "It was a bad winter" is not.
It supports extensions of time
Most building contracts allow an extension for delays outside your control, and nearly all require notice within a set period. A contemporaneous record is what makes that claim work.
It supports compensable delay
A delay caused by a client's late decision or a design change is often chargeable. The diary is the evidence. Reconstructed from memory, it is worth very little.
A diary written later is not a diary. Its whole value is in being contemporaneous. Written up on Friday from memory, it records what you now believe happened — which is worth almost nothing when the point of the exercise is proving what did.
The weather is on the day before you write anything
Wet-weather delay is the most commonly claimed and the most commonly disputed. A recorded delay sitting next to the recorded conditions for that date is a far stronger position than a note saying it rained.
SmarteBuild takes the weather from the site address, not from your office — which matters the moment you have two jobs an hour apart and only one of them got the storm.
Enough structure to be useful, little enough to be finished
Every section is optional. A quiet day is three taps. A bad one is where the detail earns its keep.
Delay today is the headline figure — how much time the job actually lost — and it is the number the claim is eventually built on.
What a day holds
- Project team on site
- Your own people
- Subcontractors on site
- Which trades, and how many
- Visitors register
- The client, a surveyor, an inspector, anyone else
- Deliveries
- What arrived, and from whom
- Project delays
- Time lost, and the reason
- Issues
- Anything affecting cost or programme
- Notes and photos
- Everything else, with captions
It gets written on the phone, or it does not get written
The diary that exists is the one filled in standing on site while the concrete truck leaves. The desktop is for reviewing a run of days, printing one as a formal diary form, and pulling the delays together when it is time to claim.
A closer look at the site diary
One day, a fortnight of them, and the version that gets printed.
What it connects to
Nothing in SmarteBuild is an island — that is the point of it. Site Diary reads from and feeds into these.
Schedule & Gantt
Plan the build, move a date, and see what shifts with it
Mobile & On Site
The job in your pocket, including where reception is poor
Checklists & Safety
Inspections signed off on site, and an incident register behind them
Progress Claims
Claim by percentage or by stage, variations included, and track payment
Want the detail?
The help centre documents Site Diary step by step, with worked examples — written for people using it, not for a brochure.
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