Site diary done before you leave the gate.
Your site managers dictate the day in three minutes over a Teams call. Syntact turns it into the finished daily report — VOB- and ÖNORM-B-2110-ready, linked to the bill of quantities, T&M reports prepped for sign-off. Ready to bill the same day.
“… sewer line B fully installed, 42 metres. Two men on T&M for the excavation shoring, three hours, agreed with site supervision. Rain until noon, crane down until ten …”
The building gets done properly. The paperwork gets done eventually.
Not because your site managers are sloppy — but because after ten hours on site, nobody wants to type reports. The consequences land in accounting.
The site day ends on site — the daily report gets written days later, from memory. Patchy, imprecise, and easy to attack in a dispute.
What got done sits in free text. Which BoQ item it belongs to, nobody knows. Progress tracking and valuation? Pure manual labour.
Work that isn't reported cleanly never makes it onto an interim invoice. The invoice slips — and your cash flow slips with it.
Time-and-material (Regie) work must be recorded separately, countersigned by the client, and billed on its own. Without a same-day T&M report: disputed, struck, given away.
VOB & ÖNORM don't know “later”.
The rules reward whoever documents same-day and transmits on time — up to and including deemed approval when the client stays silent. And they punish everyone else. A site diary written on the weekend throws that advantage away.
The German VOB/B (§ 15) expects time-sheets for T&M work daily or weekly. If you only write them at month-end, you're long past the deadline.
If the client doesn't return submitted T&M sheets within 6 working days, they are deemed approved (§ 15 (3) VOB/B). The deadline works for whoever documents same-day.
Under Austria's ÖNORM B 2110, transmitted daily reports that aren't contested in writing within 14 days count as confirmed — the burden of proof flips.
Cost claims from disruptions must be announced immediately under ÖNORM B 2110 — or the claim is (partially) forfeited. Without a daily record, there's nothing to base it on.
What do the T&M hours nobody writes down cost you?
A conservative calculation: 44 construction weeks/year, T&M hours only. Late interim invoices, lost change orders and your site managers' evenings aren't even counted yet.
Dictate the daily report instead of typing it.
No new device, no new app: your site managers use the Teams on the phone they already carry. The AI site documentation does the rest — embedded in your existing system landscape.
Leaving the site: one Teams call to the Syntact assistant. Your site manager or foreman talks for three minutes — trades, crew, plant, weather, incidents, T&M work. Photos go straight into the Teams chat. No new app login, no 40 mandatory fields.
The spoken word becomes a daily site report in your template — compliant with VOB/B and Austria's ÖNORM B 2110. Completed work is matched to bill-of-quantities items (target data imported as GAEB DA XML / ÖNORM A 2063 from RIB iTWO, AUER Success X, NEVARIS & co). T&M work is detected and split into separate T&M reports.
Next morning: review, approve, transmit on time. T&M reports go to the client digitally for countersignature. Progress and hours flow into your commercial systems — the basis for progress reports, interim invoices and payroll.
Approval stays with you: no report leaves the house without your site manager's OK. The AI drafts — people decide.
Site diary apps digitise the form. Syntact connects the diary to the money.
A site diary that doesn't know your bill of quantities is an archive. One that maps every entry to a BoQ item is a billing basis.
Today the same reality gets captured over and over: site diary, T&M report, time sheets, progress report. With Syntact everything comes from one capture flow — your site manager's dictation.
Documentation without a link to the bill of quantities is an archive. With it, it's a billing basis. Exactly that separates Syntact from plain documentation apps.
Construction apps die on adoption: 40 fields, small buttons, no time. Dictating works — with dialect, with site noise, and at 4 pm on a Friday.
No WhatsApp island your IT despairs over: Syntact runs inside your Microsoft 365 — your users, your permissions, your SharePoint filing.
Timestamps, original recording, change history: same-day documentation you can stand on for change orders, disruption notices and extra-cost claims.
After the site diary, invoice verification, tender analysis or your knowledge assistant run on the same platform — one foundation, every next use case gets cheaper.
Your systems stay. Syntact connects them.
Target data comes from your AVA and estimating software via data carrier or API. Reports, progress and hours flow back into your commercial systems.
Missing connectors we build for free — contractually guaranteed. Compatible with anything that exports GAEB DA XML or ÖNORM A 2063.
We carry the risk. You keep the control.
A site-diary pilot on a real project, with your BoQ and your site managers — on terms where doing nothing is the most expensive option.
If your site diary isn't live in production after 90 days, we keep working for free until it is.
You pay no platform license while the pilot isn't in production. The risk is on us.
Data-carrier import (GAEB DA XML / ÖNORM A 2063), Teams connection and your report template — set up, not sold.
90 days of direct access to the person who builds your use case — no ticket system, no call centre.
If the pilot doesn't ship to production, you pay only half the implementation.
Missing an interface to your system? We build it for free — written into the contract.
Watch Syntact work with real construction data.
In the video: a BIM model (IFC) gets indexed and queried in natural language — the same platform that links your site diary to the bill of quantities. Syntact is the AI foundation platform for enterprise: one foundation for every use case, operated in the EU, all the way to on-premises.
- BoQ, drawings, reports and photos in one semantic data layer
- Permissions & audit log on every level
- After the site diary: invoice verification, tender analysis, knowledge assistant — same platform
30 minutes. Your BoQ. One finished report.
No slide deck: bring a contract bill of quantities and describe one site day — we show you the finished daily report, T&M report included.
- Feasibility on your projectA live demo built on your BoQ — not on our demo dataset.
- A concrete 90-day pilot planSteps, timeline, and what we need from your IT (little).
- Pricing in black and whitePlatform, implementation, guarantees — no surprises.
- An engineer, not a salespersonYou talk to the solutions architect who builds the pilot.
- Is a site diary mandatory?
- The site diary — in the US usually called a construction daily report or daily log — is not required by a general statute; the obligation comes from the contract or the role. For architects and engineers doing site supervision, documenting the construction process is a core duty (HOAI service phase 8 in Germany), and public clients regularly require it in their contract terms. Contractors need daily reports at the latest when progress, disruptions or T&M work must be proven — under the German VOB/B just as under Austria's ÖNORM B 2110.
- Who keeps the site diary?
- In Germany it's usually the site manager or the supervising architect; in Austria the client-side site supervision (ÖBA) keeps the Baubuch. Contractors keep their own daily site reports — as proof of work performed, crew levels, disruptions and T&M work. Exactly those reports are what Syntact creates from your site managers' dictation.
- What belongs in a site diary?
- Per working day: date, weather and temperature, companies present and crew strength, plant on site, work performed and progress, deliveries, special events such as disruptions, client instructions, and defects. Photos with timestamps add a lot of evidential weight. Syntact actively asks for missing items during dictation and adds weather data automatically.
- Is a digital site diary legally sound?
- Yes — there is no prescribed form. What counts is completeness, timeliness and tamper-resistance. A digital diary with automatic timestamps, the original voice recording, weather data and a change history is far more robust in a dispute than a Word file written days later.
- What is T&M (Regie) work — and why does it get lost?
- Time-and-material work is billed by actual effort instead of unit prices from the bill of quantities — typical for unforeseen extra work. It must be agreed in advance, recorded continuously, and submitted to the client promptly for confirmation. It gets lost because nobody writes down in the evening who did what on T&M. Syntact detects T&M work in the dictation and automatically creates separate T&M reports for sign-off.
- When do T&M sheets have to be submitted?
- Under § 15 (3) of the German VOB/B, T&M sheets are to be submitted daily or weekly. If the client doesn't return them within 6 working days, they are deemed approved. The T&M invoice itself is due at the latest every four weeks. Document same-day and these deadlines become your ally.
- What does Austria's ÖNORM B 2110 require?
- If ÖNORM B 2110 is part of the contract, the contractor keeps continuous daily reports on anything that can materially affect the works and transmits them to the other party. If they don't object in writing within 14 days, the content counts as confirmed. T&M work must be recorded daily and submitted promptly; extra-cost claims must be announced immediately.
- How does the target data get from RIB iTWO or AUER into Syntact?
- Via data carrier: Syntact imports your contract bill of quantities as GAEB DA XML (e.g. X86) or ÖNORM A 2063 — formats every common AVA and estimating package exports, from RIB iTWO to AUER Success X, NEVARIS, ABK or ORCA. Direct API connections are possible; missing connectors we build for free.
- Does it cope with dialect and site noise?
- Yes. Dictation happens over a Teams call — speech recognition covers German including Austrian and southern German varieties (and English), primed with your project context: trades, BoQ items, company names. In the pilot we prove it with your site managers on your sites, not in a lab.
- How is Syntact different from PlanRadar, 123erfasst & co?
- Documentation apps digitise the form — Syntact connects the documentation to the money. The daily report is created by voice in Microsoft Teams and automatically linked to your BoQ items and commercial systems: one dictation becomes the site diary, the T&M report and the progress report. Existing tools can stay — Syntact is the platform underneath, not another island app.
- What about data protection and employee data?
- Syntact is operated GDPR-compliant in the EU — on request in your own cloud or on-premises. Personal data such as crew levels stays in your systems, and access follows your permission model. We provide the documentation your DPO and works council will ask for.
- What does it cost?
- The platform starts at €800 per month — and the license only starts once you're in production. Setup and BoQ connection are included in the pilot package, and the implementation is covered by the 50/50 guarantee. In the demo we'll build the business case with your numbers: a few billed T&M hours per week already carry the license.
The next site day is coming either way. The question is whether it costs you money.
Three minutes of dictation instead of three hours of paperwork — and not one more T&M hour drowning in the project budget.