'Can you send us a schedule of everything you have on site?'
A main contractor's commercial manager emails before their monthly meeting. They want a list of every scaffold you have on their three sites: location, date erected, current hire status, alterations, and the latest handover certificate for each. Your office spends a morning pulling it together from the job sheets, the hire records and the certificate folder.
Next month they ask again. The month after, a different contractor asks for the same thing in a different format.
Why it is always done by hand
The information exists but sits in different places: jobs in one system, hire in a spreadsheet, certificates in folders, alterations on job sheets. Nothing combines them by customer and site, so every request becomes a small project.
- Scaffolds are recorded as jobs, not as items standing on a site.
- Hire status is in a separate spreadsheet.
- Paperwork is filed by date, not by scaffold.
- Each contractor wants a different format.
- Requests come at month end, when the office is busiest.
What it costs
Office time on reporting that adds nothing new. Errors in hand-built lists that cause disputes about hire. Contractors who find you harder to deal with than a competitor who can answer quickly. And delays to payment when the contractor wants the list reconciled before paying.
It also slows payment. Many contractors will not sign off a hire valuation until they are happy with the list of scaffolds and dates behind it, so a slow or inaccurate schedule pushes back money you are already owed.
The customer view we build
- Each scaffold is recorded as an item on a site, linked to the job that erected it, from the records you already keep.
- Hire status, erect date, extensions and off-hire requests come from your hire records.
- Alterations are linked to the scaffold with their dates.
- Handover certificates and other admin records you choose to share are attached to each scaffold.
- Each main contractor gets a secure login or link showing their sites and scaffolds, with documents downloadable.
- Schedules can be exported in the formats contractors ask for, generated from the same data.
- Contractors can raise alteration and off-hire requests from the view, which feed your normal routes.
| Contractor sees | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Scaffolds on each site | Your job records |
| Erect date and hire status | Your hire records |
| Alterations | Alteration orders |
| Handover and admin records | Your filed documents |
| Open requests | Off-hire and alteration logs |
You choose what each contractor sees. Nothing is shared that you have not decided to share.
After the view is live
Contractors check the status of their scaffolds themselves. Month-end schedules are an export, not a morning's work. Disputes about hire dates are settled from the same records both sides can see. And being easy to deal with becomes a reason contractors keep using you.
Your own office benefits as much as the contractor does. The same view, without the customer filter, is a list of every scaffold standing, which is useful for planning strikes, checking hire and answering questions quickly.
Do contractors ask you for this?
- You build scaffold schedules by hand for contractors.
- Each contractor wants a different format.
- Hire disputes come from mismatched lists.
- Finding certificates for a site takes time.