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Field operations

What this covers

Section titled “What this covers”

Two things happen on a job site every day that have to be written down: what occurred, and who worked on it. The first becomes the project’s history. The second becomes its labour cost.

This area is how both get captured on site, the day they happen, rather than reconstructed from memory later.

The site record is made in the Field App on an iPad, and appears in the Admin Portal’s Construction section. The Admin Portal calls the module Project Updates and Legacy KI calls the same thing Daily Logs. There is one record under two names.

On site you can post a project update with photos, raise an issue, and start a change order. The app also carries the current plan set from the Final Design tab — whatever is posted there is what the field builds from — plus read-only views of Cost Control, Purchase Orders, Pay Applications and Contracts.

Safety inspections

Section titled “Safety inspections”

Monthly jobsite inspections and the jobsite safety plan are kept in the Admin Portal’s Construction section (section 13.3), and an inspection can also be recorded on site in the Field App on an iPad.

The inspection is a checklist, and every item is answered safe, unsafe, or not applicable. Anything answered unsafe becomes a Safety Concern when the inspection is completed, carrying the item it came from, the date it was found, and the party responsible for putting it right. Concerns stay outstanding against the project until somebody resolves one with a note saying how it was corrected and, ideally, a photo of the correction — so what was found on a walk does not end at the walk.

A Safety Concern is not an Issue. Issues are the project’s tracked questions and problems, raised by anyone and typed by what they concern. Safety Concerns come only from an inspection item marked unsafe and live on the safety screen, outstanding or resolved. Do not expect one to show up in the other’s list.

Past inspections can be read back and exported from either place, and a report runs across them — on the iPad as well as in the Admin Portal. A project with no completed inspection in the last 30 days is flagged as overdue.

The daily record

Section titled “The daily record”

A day’s entry is a dated record of one day on one project — what happened, who was on site, the conditions the work was performed under, issues that came up, anything that moved the schedule, and quality observations.

Entries are kept day by day rather than summarised at the end. That matters when a question surfaces months later: when something was installed, how long a delay actually ran, what the site was like on a particular date. The answer is an entry written that day.

Project updates flow on to the Client Portal, so the record made on site is also what the client sees.

Time entry

Section titled “Time entry”

Hours are recorded against a project and a Cost Code. The Cost Code is the part that does the work: it is the same classification the Estimate and the budget use, so labour lands in the category the work was priced under, and planned cost and actual cost can be compared line for line.

Hours recorded without that classification would tell you what a job cost in total but not where it went. Recorded with it, they tell you which parts of the job ran long.

Time is entered in the Time Entry module, and the dashboard carries a time card entry too.

How hours become cost

Section titled “How hours become cost”

Payroll is what turns approved time into job cost, and it runs in Legacy KI Accounting:

  1. The payroll process pulls everyone’s time and produces their time cards.
  2. When payroll is complete a report is generated for upload to ADP, and it establishes actual cost by job and Cost Code.
  3. KI consumes that report and creates a journal entry to QuickBooks that charges jobs at billable rates, records actuals, and accrues the difference to a labor reconciliation GL (general ledger) Code.
  4. Payroll then pushes to the job costs shown in Cost Control, calculated as hours × the employee’s billable rate, so QuickBooks and our job costs agree.

History can be searched by project, Cost Code, or time period. Overhead employees who are not charged to jobs carry a GL Code rather than a job rate. See section 19.6.

Section titled “Related”