How to track subcontractors: crews, headcount and daily work logs

The boss asks over the phone: “How many people did the structural crew bring today?” The site manager thinks for a moment: “Around twelve.” “And the rebar fixers?” “They were here in the morning; I don’t know about the afternoon.” At the end of the month, the subcontractor says fourteen people worked, and there is no record to confirm or refute it. When they hang up, the site manager and the boss are thinking the same thing: tomorrow nobody will remember this figure exactly. Subcontractor tracking means the main contractor keeping a record of how many people each subcontractor crew has on site, what work it does on which day and which open items it still has. The aim is less to police the subcontractor than to make sure both sides are looking at the same figure.

Tracking covers four things: crews and headcount, work done, open defects and the contract. The first three are tracked daily; the last is tracked against its dates.

What do you track when monitoring subcontractors?

How do I record how many people a subcontractor had on site on a given day?

The rule is simple: take the figure from one source, every day, in the same format. An answer from memory such as “around twelve” is not a figure; “12 people, full day”, written by the crew lead at the end of the day, is.

1. Name a crew lead for each subcontractor, with their name and mobile number on record.
2. Get the figure from the crew lead or the foreman towards the end of the day, on the same day.
3. Fix the message format: crew name, headcount, full or half day, work done.
4. Have half days and overtime written separately; don’t read “half day” on its own as “didn’t come”.
5. Don’t leave the line blank for a crew that sends no figure; write “no record received” so the gap is visible.
6. Once a week, show the crew lead the total for their crew; if there is a dispute, settle it that week rather than leaving it until month end.

A sample message could read: “Structural crew 12 people, rebar fixers 4 people half day.” One line carries two crews, two different working patterns and a total of 14 person-days (counting a half day as 0.5).

How does a day’s record flow?

• Morning: The site manager writes a short note on which crews will work in which block today; the office sees this note as the day plan.
• During the day: If a defect or a materials problem comes up, the crew lead reports it with a photo; the item is opened straight away under the crew’s name.
• Evening: Crew leads send the headcount in the agreed format; for any crew whose figure has not arrived, the office asks the foreman.
• Next morning: The office reviews the previous day’s entries and clarifies anything unclear, so discrepancies are found the next day rather than a week later.

Subcontractor timesheet example: weekly crew summary

The summary below shows a week of records for three crews at a glance. The crews and figures are made up; the aim is to show how daily records come together in a weekly summary.

When reading the table, interpret the figures together rather than one by one. The structural crew’s 48 person-days may be lower than expected because it lost a day to rain; the electrical crew’s single open defect comes not from the work but from waiting for materials. A summary like this turns the weekly meeting with the subcontractor from an argument about “how many people came” into a conversation about “what are we waiting for, and when will it be closed”.

How do you link defects and work to the subcontractor?

As important as the headcount is linking the outcome of the work to the crew. Don’t record a defect as “there is a defect on site”; record it with the crew name, the block and floor, and a photo, and ask for a photo when it is closed. That way, at month end you can see both how much work a crew did and how much it left unfinished. If a crew has a high number of person-days but many unclosed defects, that is proof that the headcount on its own says nothing.

Three traps in subcontractor tracking

• Turning tracking into a penalty: If the figure is only ever used to find out “who under-reported”, crews will stop sharing information. Present the record as a shared reference; at month end it helps both sides.
• Collecting more personal data than necessary: If a headcount per crew is enough, keep names, phone numbers and other details only to the extent you really need them.
• Mistaking the figure for progress: A crew with many person-days is not necessarily making fast progress. Always read the headcount together with the work done and the defects closed.

WhatsApp, Excel and notebooks for subcontractor tracking: where do they work, and where do they break down?

With a single site, a few crews and an organised site manager, an Excel sheet and a daily message do the job well. The points where this breaks down are usually the same:

• The figure stays in a conversation and never gets written down, or is written down from memory at the end of the day.
• The figure is buried somewhere in the group chat; when you search for it at month end, it cannot be found.
• The same subcontractor’s name is written in different ways (“Structural”, “Structural crew”, “Yilmaz”) and the totals get split.
• Because a defect is not linked to a crew, the question “whose defect is this?” goes unanswered.
• The contract file sits in another folder; the period the crew worked and the contract dates cannot be seen side by side.

How does tracking work with SahaSesi AI and the contract module?

In SahaSesi AI, when a site is opened, the names and mobile numbers of the foreman and subcontractor leads are added; each of them receives a short welcome message on WhatsApp. Messages from the site such as “Structural crew 12 people, rebar fixers 4 people half day” are logged as timesheet entries per person or per subcontractor crew; half days and overtime are kept separately. A defect with a photo is opened against the responsible subcontractor and closes when the closing photo arrives. Every entry is read back for confirmation, the office checks it in the panel, and the monthly timesheet downloads to Excel by person and subcontractor.

For the contract side, KurumsalPortal’s Contract Management module keeps employee, customer, supplier, service, lease and maintenance contracts in one archive, with start and end dates, version, owner and approval details, and sends expiry alerts. We do not claim that there is a ready-made data flow between the two products; the office puts the daily figures from the site side by side with the scope and dates in the contract. SahaSesi AI is being rolled out with the first construction sites through a pilot programme.

A short checklist for the weekly subcontractor meeting

• Is the weekly person-day total per crew the same as the subcontractor’s own figure?
• Have half days and overtime been recorded according to the agreed rule?
• Have open defects been reviewed one by one with the crew lead?
• Is there a closing photo for every closed defect?
• Have you asked about crew size and the work plan for next week?
• Is a contract end or renewal date coming up?

If you want to record your subcontractor crews’ daily headcount and defects from WhatsApp, you can schedule a pilot call on the SahaSesi AI page.