The planner is building the extension-of-time claim for late access to the podium. The delay ran from March to May. He asks the site office for the daily reports for those weeks. Three weeks are missing altogether. The rest say "work in progress, levels 2 and 3", with no manpower numbers, no mention of the blocked area and no photos. The site engineer who wrote them has since left the company. Everyone remembers that the podium was blocked. Nobody can show it.
What it costs
A delay claim is argued from the programme, but it is proved by contemporaneous records: what was planned, what happened on each day, who was on site and what stopped them. When the daily records are thin, the Engineer can only grant the days the records support. The rest of the delay stays with the contractor, along with the delay damages.
The contractor claims 60 days. The records support 22. With delay damages of AED 15,000 per day, the 38 unsupported days leave AED 570,000 of exposure, before any prolongation cost that cannot be recovered either.
How it is usually handled
- A daily report template in Excel lives on the site engineer's laptop and is filled in at the end of the week, from memory.
- Photos stay on phones, without dates or locations anyone can trust.
- Events that matter, such as a blocked access or a stopped crew, are mentioned in a WhatsApp group and never reach the report.
- Reports are written as progress summaries, not as a record of what stopped the work.
- Nothing links the report to the programme activity that was delayed.
The report exists on paper but proves nothing, because it was not written to be evidence.
How Quanto Management handles it
Quanto works in the browser on phones and tablets, so the site team records the day from site, not from the office on Friday. The record is built from site events in 14 types, among them deliveries, inspections, weather, delays, instructions and incidents, each with hours lost and impact.
- Photos and videos are tagged by area and linked to events, programme activities, BOQ lines, variations and letters.
- One project log records every action automatically, with who and when: the project's permanent memory.
- The programme is imported from Primavera P6 or MS Project, with the baseline and progress updates, so the delayed activity is there to link to.
- A claim with extension of time is linked to its site events, photos and letters as evidence, and a continuing claim takes interim updates.
- In Business and above, time impact analysis with fragnets runs on the programme.
When the planner prepares the claim, the evidence for each day is already attached to the event that caused the delay.
A short checklist
- Write the daily record on the day, from site. A report written on Friday is a recollection.
- Record what stopped the work, not only what progressed.
- Record manpower and plant by area, including the crews standing idle.
- Take dated photos of blocked areas every day the block lasts, from the same position.
- Name the programme activity affected in the record itself.
- Ask the Engineer's staff to sign or acknowledge the records regularly, so they are not disputed later.
Tomorrow: the subcontractor who started before approval.
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