In short
Labour attendance recorded on the phone at the site, in the language the site manager thinks in, is the single highest-leverage change a builder can make, because wages and per-site labour cost are both computed from it.
Of everything a construction business records, hazri is the most frequent and the least respected. It is taken once or twice a day, in five minutes, standing up, usually by a site manager who is simultaneously answering the phone and pointing at a slab.
And every labour number in the business is downstream of it. Weekly wages come out of hazri. Per-site labour cost comes out of hazri. Whether a sub-contractor’s bill is reasonable comes out of hazri. If the attendance is approximate, all three are approximate.
Why the pocket diary loses information
The diary itself is fine. What loses information is the journey it takes:
- Marked at the site, in shorthand only its author can read.
- Carried in a pocket for a week, through dust and one rain.
- Read out over the phone, or handed to the office on Saturday.
- Typed into a sheet by someone who was not there and cannot query a smudge.
- Reconciled against a wage payment already made in cash on Friday.
Each step is a place where a half-day becomes a full day, an absent mason becomes a present one, and an overtime hour disappears. Nobody intends any of it. The information simply cannot survive five transfers.
What a good hazri entry actually holds
Not much, which is the point. A day’s attendance should take under a minute to record for a gang of twenty:
- Who was present, as a tap per person rather than a typed name.
- Full day, half day or overtime: three states, not a free-text note.
- The site, filled in automatically because the manager is standing on it.
- The rate, taken from the worker’s record rather than remembered.
- Who marked it and when, kept whether anyone asks or not.
From that, the wage total for the week computes itself, and so does the labour line in that site’s cost. Nobody prepares either one.
The other half: the payment
Attendance without payment is half a record. Most disputes we have heard about are not about who worked. They are about what was paid against what was worked, and when. A wage payment should be recorded against the same days it settles, so the outstanding figure per worker or per gang is a fact rather than an argument.
That also removes the most common friction in the whole business: the Friday evening conversation where a mistry says he is owed for two more days and nobody has anything to check it against except two memories.
Attendance is the cheapest record to take and the most expensive one to get wrong.
A note on language
The person taking hazri is often the person least comfortable in English. If the screen asks for a decision in a second language, the entry gets postponed to the end of the day, and postponement is exactly what turns a record into a reconstruction. Attendance has to be in the language the site manager thinks in, which for most of the sites we work with means Gujarati, in full, not as a partial translation of the buttons.
Sitegride puts sites, sales, purchases, labour and money in one place, in English and Gujarati.