A site diary that is written by the evening and signed by you
The diary is the thing that gets written last, badly, on a Sunday night, from memory. Or it does not get written at all until a client asks for March, and then somebody spends a day reconstructing March out of a phone. It is the cheapest record you can keep and the most expensive one to keep late.
It is drafted before you open it
There is one diary per site per day, and it starts itself. By the time you look, it already holds who was on that site and for how long, how each of them was recorded, who was booked there and approved to be away, and what was raised or closed out on that site that day.
Every word of that draft is written by code, not composed. That is a deliberate limit rather than a shortcoming. A signed diary cannot be edited afterwards, so a sentence somebody put their name to had better be a sentence with a traceable origin. Nothing in the draft is invented, softened, or phrased for effect, and nothing in it came out of a model.
- Who was on site, with the minutes behind each name.
- How each attendance was recorded, in plain words like "shared location".
- Who was booked on the site and approved to be away.
- What was raised that day, and what was closed out.
A person signs it, and the signature means something
You read the draft, you add whatever the day needs in your own words, and you sign it. Who is allowed to sign is your firm’s own setting, so a firm that wants only a contracts manager signing can have that, and a firm that trusts its foremen can have that instead.
Once a day is signed it is fixed. It cannot be edited. If something was wrong, the correction is a new version of that day, and the version you signed first stays readable underneath it. That is what lets a client read the version they were given beside the corrected one, rather than being told the record has always said this.
The day the diary is about and the day it was signed are two different things, and both are kept. If you sign Tuesday’s diary on Wednesday morning, it says so.
A late signature is recorded, not refused
Your firm sets an hour by which a day should be signed. Miss it and the diary is still signed, and it is marked as signed late. Nothing refuses it.
That is not softness. The first time your site manager is off sick on a Thursday, a system that refuses a late signature leaves that Thursday unsigned for ever, and an unsigned day is a worse record than a day signed forty eight hours later and saying so. A weaker record gets a weaker word, and a reader can see which is which.
What it will not tell you
It carries what the day’s record actually holds and nothing else. There is no weather, no plant, no deliveries and no temperature, because nothing feeds those and a field somebody has to remember to fill in is a field that is empty by the second week.
It does not prove anybody was on your site. Attendance in the diary reads as the method it was recorded by, never as proof, for the same reason it reads that way on a timesheet: a phone is not a person. What the diary is good for is being contemporaneous, complete and signed, which is a great deal more than most sites have.
And a site where people were booked and nobody clocked in says exactly that, in words, rather than showing an empty section. An empty section reads as a fault in the page. A sentence saying nobody clocked in is information.
The diary is not legal advice and it is not a legal instrument. It is a dated record of who was where, which is the record you are asked for first when somebody comes looking. There is more on that in the 1 October 2026 illegal working rules.
Where the day’s record comes from
From the same messages your crew already send. A man says he is on, a man says he is off, and that becomes attendance on a site. Nothing is typed twice and nobody keys the diary in from a timesheet, because they are the same record read two ways. The mechanics of that side are on WhatsApp timesheets.
The things people ask
Can I edit a diary after I have signed it?
No. You issue a new version of that day, and the version you signed first stays readable. Nothing is quietly overwritten.
Who is allowed to sign?
Whichever part of your business you say. It is a setting on the firm, and the system refuses a signature from anyone the setting does not cover.
What happens on a day nobody was on site?
The diary says so. If people were booked and none of them clocked in, it says that too, because an empty page reads as a broken page.
What it costs
Everyone using it counts, managers and office staff too. Cancel whenever you like.