SiteVector Explained: What It Records, What It Seals and What the Data Is For

Most construction data is captured perfectly well and then lost. It is written on a whiteboard that gets wiped, in a notebook that goes home in a ute, or into a spreadsheet whose format changes when the person who built it moves to another project. The information existed. It was correct on the day. It simply is not there when someone needs it eight months later and by then the person who knew has gone.

SiteVector exists to close that gap. It records what happens on site as it happens, in the same structure on every project, locks and seals each day when the site closes and produces a record anyone can verify without an account. That is the whole idea. The rest of this piece is what that means in practice, what the data is good for once it exists and the things SiteVector deliberately does not do.

What Gets Recorded

Four things, each one built around something a person on site already does rather than something extra to be done.

Flow covers deliveries, gate to departure. Who arrived, what they brought, when they got there, how long they waited, how long unloading took, when they left and whether the delivery held up the work that was waiting on it. Turnaround is calculated rather than estimated. Over a few months this becomes the only honest account of which suppliers actually turn up when they say they will.

Commit covers the day's work. Tasks are planned against a trade, a category and a person and marked off as they complete. When something does not get done, the person recording it picks a reason from a fixed list rather than typing a sentence. That constraint is the point and it is the single most important design decision in the product. Free text cannot be counted. A fixed list can.

Vector covers programme health. Buffer against progress, zone by zone, recorded daily as a by-product of the other two rather than as a separate reporting exercise. It is the number that tells you a fortnight early that something is drifting, at a point where it is still cheap to do something about it.

Vault is where it all comes back out. Shift diaries, weekly reports, supplier and subcontractor performance, root cause analysis and a full export of the project. The site diary is generated from the day's actual entries rather than written separately at five o'clock by someone reconstructing the day from memory.

Photographs attach to any of it, carrying the original capture time and location from the device alongside the upload time, so a photo taken at 7am and uploaded at 4pm is recorded as both. Documents attach too, dockets, manifests, sign-off sheets and a fingerprint of each file is carried into the day's seal.

What Happens at the End of the Day

When the site closes, the day is locked. At that moment SiteVector computes a SHA-256 fingerprint across a fixed set of the day's fields and stores it. Once sealed, the entries for that day cannot be quietly altered.

If a day genuinely does need to change and sometimes it does, it can be unlocked. What it cannot do is change without leaving a mark. Every unlock is permanently logged with a timestamp, a reason and the name of the person who did it and the day is resealed afterwards. A record that has been unlocked three times says so on its face.

Each sealed day produces a Day Record PDF carrying a QR code. Anyone can scan it, with no SiteVector account and no login and check whether the stored record still matches what was sealed. A contract administrator can do it. So can a subcontractor, an adjudicator, or an expert acting for the other side. That is deliberate. A record only one party can check is not much of a record.

What the Data Is Actually For

This is the part that gets underplayed and it is the reason the fixed reason list matters so much.

Because every project records the same way, using the same categories and the same reasons, data from one project is directly comparable to data from another. Not roughly comparable. Actually comparable. Your project in January can be set against your project last year, or the one starting next month, or the other four running right now and the comparison holds.

That is what turns a record-keeping tool into something more useful. Lean construction has understood for decades that the interesting number is not how much got done, it is how often what you said would happen actually happened and why it did not when it did not. Percent plan complete is a simple measure and it is a brutal one. Counting it honestly for a month tells you more about a project than most reporting packs manage in a year.

The same applies to the reasons. A single blocked task is an anecdote. Four hundred blocked tasks, categorised consistently, sorted by frequency, is a Pareto chart and a Pareto chart tends to say something uncomfortable and specific. Usually that a small number of causes account for most of the disruption and that everybody half knew which ones they were.

None of this requires anyone to run a lean programme, adopt Last Planner, or send people on a course. The data accumulates because the site team is doing its normal job. What SiteVector does is surface it in a form where a pattern is visible.

What it does not do is tell you what the pattern means. There is no AI in SiteVector inferring causes, scoring performance or attributing fault. The data is structured. The judgement stays human, with the people who know the project. That is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature.

Where It Sits

Worth being blunt about this, because it is the question every construction manager asks within the first two minutes.

SiteVector is not a project management platform. It is not a programme tool, a cost system or a document register. It has no quality management, no ITPs, no conformance records and no hold points. It does not do procurement, contracts, RFIs or drawings.

It does not replace Procore, Jobpac, Cheops, Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project and it is not trying to. If you already run one of those, keep running it. SiteVector feeds structured data about what actually happened on site into whatever you already use and exports to Excel so it can go anywhere else.

It also makes no claim about how any record will be treated by a court, a tribunal or an adjudicator. It records what was observed, when and by whom and it can show that the record has not changed since it was sealed. What anyone does with that is a matter for them and their lawyers.

The reason to be this specific is that construction software has a long history of promising to be everything and arriving as very little. A narrow tool that does one thing properly is more useful than a broad one that needs a six month implementation and a full time administrator.

Who Actually Uses It

The gate operator logs the delivery. Three taps, on a phone, at the gate.

The site manager records what the trades completed and picks a reason for anything that did not get done. Then locks the day on the way out.

The contract administrator has a timestamped, tamper-evident record of every delivery and task, already structured, without having asked anyone for it.

The project manager sees programme health in real time instead of waiting for a Friday update that was assembled on Thursday.

The construction manager looks across every active project and sees the same consistent picture from each one, rather than five spreadsheets in five formats.

Nobody in that list is doing data entry. That is the test the product has to pass. If capturing the record costs the site team real time, it will not get captured and everything downstream of it stops working.

What It Costs

Priced per project rather than per seat, so the whole project team is included at every tier and there is no reason to ration access to the people who most need to record things. Every module is included at every tier. There are no add-ons and no feature levels.

There is a free 60 day trial with no card required and if a project ends or a trial lapses, read-only access to the records is preserved for six months and everything can still be downloaded. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Questions People Ask

What is a site diary and what should be in one? A dated record of what happened on site that day: who was there, what work was done, what was delivered, the weather and anything that stopped or delayed the work. The detail that matters most is usually the last one, because a diary that only records what went well is no use when the question is why something took longer than planned.

What is the difference between a site diary and a daily report? In practice the diary is the raw record and the report is the summary sent onwards. Problems start when the report is written first and the diary is reconstructed from it afterwards, because detail gets lost in the direction that suits whoever is writing.

Do photos on a phone count as a site record? They help but on their own they are hard to rely on. A photo in a camera roll or a chat thread has no structure, no context and no certainty about when it was taken or by whom. The value comes from a photo being attached to a dated, described event, with its original capture time preserved.

How long should construction site records be kept? Longer than most people expect, because limitation periods for construction claims run for years after completion and vary by jurisdiction and contract. Check your contract and take advice on the position where you are building. As a rule, if a record was worth making it is worth keeping well past practical completion.

How long does it take to get a project running? Minutes rather than weeks. It runs in a browser, there is nothing to install, no integration to build and no IT approval to obtain.

Do subcontractors and suppliers need their own accounts? No. Records are made by your team about what happened and pricing is per project rather than per seat, so there is no cost reason to restrict who on your side can use it.

Where is the data stored? On Australian infrastructure, in Sydney. It does not leave the country.

What happens if nobody locks the day? The day locks automatically at end of day and is sealed the same way. A day that nobody remembered to close is still a sealed record.

Can we get our data out and in what format? Yes, at any time, as Excel, Word or PDF. The full project workbook exports in one go. The data is yours and it is not held hostage.

SiteVector is free to trial for 60 days, on a live project, with no card required.