So, your team has jumped at the chance to use our Job Log, right?
You're already logging weather, deliveries, and trade issues. You're even tracking that elusive beast called "slippage" -- you know, the mysterious two weeks that "slips" into a production schedule and delays the delivery, yet no one ever knows exactly how it "slipped" in there.
In addition to your notes, the "flags" feature on the Job Log makes it easy to tag, with just one click, when those delays happen -- like for failed inspections and bad weather. As helpful as that is, you can use as many flags as you want to track more than just delays or mistakes.
The sky's the limit, and since everyone has their own hot button issues, here are a few creative ways you can use flags:
Clients: Create a flag called "Client Visit" to use when clients visit the jobsite, planned or un-planned. Use the "Visitors" section to track the content of conversations, but a dedicated flag is perfect for a quick heads-up about a visit or to generate a report that shows how many times they were "just stopping by."
Back charges: Things may just go wrong some days, and over-zealous partners sometimes damage other partners' work. Or, a partner may create a mess when repairing or replacing a mistake. If you have a policy of back-charging partners to offset the cost of repairing their errors, flag it "Back charge" and drop the notes in the Incidents or Issues sections.
Quality Tracking: Let's say you have two lumberyards that are neck-and-neck on their pricing and their salespeople talk a great game about "service" when they quote your project. You will only know the better choice once you start to use them.
That's when you notice the late deliveries, the half-filled deliveries, the under-spec'd materials, the short loads, the sloppy material handling... the list goes on and on. Create a flag for "Lumber yard Eval," drop the notes in Trade Work, and keep track as they compete with each other over time on your projects.
At the end of the job, you'll have the evidence on who performed better, and not just a "gut feel."
Trade Tracking: The previous two examples relate to tracking specific situations about your trades. There's also the reverse of that, where you want to track any situation related to a specific trade partner. You may decide to create flags for each of your most commonly used people.
Then, if anything noteworthy comes up related to that partner - on site, late, client meeting, failed inspection, finished early (!), etc... - you tag the log with that flag. Then put the details in the notes for that day.
You can then run a partner-specific report just by clicking on that flag in the summary view for that project.
