What are labour and plant allocation sheets for?

An allocation sheet is a daily record of resource: how many operatives were on site, in which trades or gangs, working on what, and what plant was there and for how long. It sounds like housekeeping, and on a smooth job nobody misses it, but it is one of the most valuable records a site keeps, because so many later arguments turn on resource. Daywork is the obvious one: when work is valued on a time basis, the daywork sheet, ideally signed at the time, is the evidence of the hours and plant, and an unsigned reconstruction weeks later is worth a fraction of one made on the day. Disruption and delay are quieter: when a claim depends on showing labour standing idle, a gang doubled to recover time, or plant sat waiting on someone else's default, the allocation sheets are the contemporaneous proof of what the site actually cost. They also feed the honest running of the job: comparing labour allocated against progress measured tells you whether the work is being done at the rate it was priced, the earliest warning that a job is losing money. What makes them useful is that they are completed at the time, by someone on site, in a form short enough to fill at the end of a shift, and gathered in rather than left on a clipboard. A sheet made on the day is a fact; a sheet reconstructed later is an argument.

Picture a small groundworks subcontractor whose crew is repeatedly stood down and redeployed because the main contractor's earlier trades are running late, so the priced sequence becomes impossible. At the final account they claim for the disruption, and the claim is thin: the sums are asserted from the director's recollection of bad weeks, with no day-by-day record of who was idle when or which plant sat waiting. The contractor disputes it easily. On the next job the subcontractor keeps a two-minute allocation sheet every shift, recording the gang, what they worked on and any time lost waiting on others, gathered in weekly. When the same disruption happens, the claim is no longer a recollection but a stack of dated sheets showing exactly which operatives and machines were prevented from working and for how long. The disruption did not change; the ability to prove it did.