Do daywork sheets need signatures to be worth keeping?

The honest answer is that signatures matter a great deal and their absence does not make a sheet worthless. A daywork sheet records the labour, plant and materials a change actually consumed, and its power comes from being contemporaneous: written on the day, before anyone had a reason to remember it differently. A signature from the other side's representative adds something specific: it records that they saw and agreed the resources at the time, closing off the argument that the hours or the plant were never incurred. That is why a signed sheet is close to unassailable, and why chasing the signature day by day while the work is fresh is worth the friction it causes. But an unsigned sheet is not nothing. A contemporaneous record, consistent with the site diary, the allocation sheets and the delivery tickets around it, is still real evidence of what the change took, and it beats a figure reconstructed from memory at the final account. The discipline is twofold: keep every sheet, signed or not, because the record has value in its own right, and pursue the signature as routine, because it turns a strong record into an agreed one. Never treat an unsigned sheet as not worth filing, because the alternative to a flawed record is almost always no record, and no record is how good daywork claims quietly disappear.

Take a small demolition subcontractor whose foreman fills in daywork sheets diligently but never gets them signed, because the main contractor's site manager is always busy and it feels awkward to insist. Six months on, a run of unforeseen obstructions is claimed as daywork, and the contractor's surveyor pushes back: no signatures, no agreement, prove it. The unsigned sheets, cross-checked against the site diary, the plant hire records and dated photographs of the obstructions, still carry most of the claim, because they were plainly written at the time and everything around them corroborates them. The gap is the arguing, which a signature would have closed. On the next job the foreman changes one habit: the sheet goes to the site manager at the end of each shift for a signature, and where one is refused, that refusal is noted and the sheet emailed across the same evening. The dayworks become a running record both sides have already seen rather than a negotiation.