Daily Report
A superintendent's or foreman's daily written log of what happened on-site, crews present, work completed, weather, deliveries, equipment used, and any problems or delays, kept for essentially every day of a project.
Why it matters
Memory fades, but a daily report doesn't. Months or years later, when a dispute comes up about who was on-site on a specific date or why a task took longer than planned, the daily report is often the only reliable record anyone has.
On a real project
A daily report from a rainy Tuesday notes that concrete work was postponed due to weather, that a specific delivery of rebar arrived late, and that only six of the scheduled eight workers were on-site, details nobody would remember accurately without having written them down that same day.
Who this matters most to
A Superintendent writes the daily report every single day, making it one of the most routine but important habits of the job. A Project Manager relies on that running record whenever a delay claim or dispute requires reconstructing exactly what happened and when.
Where this goes wrong
A superintendent gets busy and skips daily reports for a stretch of two weeks, meaning to fill them in later from memory. When a delay dispute comes up months afterward about exactly which days were lost to weather during that period, there's no contemporaneous record to point to, only a reconstruction from memory that the other side has no reason to simply accept.