Lost time, scene by scene

The best way to learn the lost-time tools is to watch them handle a week that could be yours. The scenes below are the everyday cases — each told as a short story, walked through step by step, with the screen recording embedded where one has been filmed. They use a running cast: Marek, a Ridgeline groundworks foreman with a phone; Cora, the principal contractor's coordinator; Quinn, the QS; Hana, the safety adviser; and the neighbouring firms — Fairhurst fit-out, Brammer M&E, Steelcraft.

Read How lost time is counted first if the vocabulary (crew-hours, the send-home test, the two tiers) is new. Every scene here also exists as an automated test the product runs on itself, so what these pages teach is pinned to what the software does.

Part one — a stoppage, start to finish

The Friday concrete pour

Ridgeline's pour is stopped mid-morning — the pump never arrived. Walked end to end:

1. Marek raises it from his phone: work stopped, the pour crew picked (the gang defaults from the crew he picks), the send-home question answered, the cause chosen.
2. Cora confirms it the same day, answering the responsible question as she does — and because she has the record in front of her, window, crew and attached work included, her confirm carries through honestly when the close later splits the record.
3. When work restarts Monday, Marek closes it; the close offers the crew's actual on-site stretches, and accepting them books the loss as it really fell.
4. By Friday the record is everywhere it should be — the ledger, the firm's own panel, the noticeboard line and the weekly. One declaration, four readers.

The principle: one record, declared in site language, feeds every figure the site reads — nothing is entered twice.

Six days in the queue

Marek's raise sits unconfirmed while Cora is busy. Nothing is lost — the record's hours accrue in the awaiting triage tier with its own total — but the queue line on the noticeboard counts the wait in whole days, and the confirm task ages with the oldest undecided record. When Cora clears the backlog, each declaration is one decision: the responsible question answered once, per-stretch rejection available where one day's claim is wrong and the next is fine ("Tuesday's count is wrong; I've no view on Wednesday" is a licensed gesture, not an inference).

Clearing the backlog moves hours from awaiting to confirmed — it never blends them, and the ledger keeps the two totals apart throughout.

Try the triage gesture yourself on a fresh demo site: Blocker awaiting triageTry it ↗.

The principle: silence is not a decision — undecided claims stay visible, aged, and separately totalled until somebody decides.

Three off sick and nobody's telling the office

Flu takes three of Ridgeline's eight. Work doesn't stop — it slows. The raise says slowed down, sickness as the cause (no names — the record counts heads, never people), three as the send-home answer. Had Marek said work stopped while five kept working, the form would have stopped him: both statements shown, each repair priced in crew-hours, neither pre-selected. The record books 3-of-8's hours, not the gang's.

The principle: the verb and the count must agree, and the form teaches the difference instead of storing a contradiction.

Some are back

A two-day stoppage ends in stages: four back Wednesday morning, the rest Thursday. Each stage is its own record — Some are back closes the stoppage and opens a slowdown with a freshly-asked count; the final All back closes the chain. The chain stays linked, each record re-declaring the gang the foreman actually had, and the queue reaches every stretch through its declaration.

The principle: a change in the loss is a new declaration with its own count — never an edit that quietly re-writes history.

Part two — machines, permits, clashes, emergencies

The crane goes down

Steelcraft's tower crane fails; the standing crew is Ridgeline's problem too. The records attach the crane, and the money page shows what that means: the machine priced once as plant standing (stoppages only), the people priced as crew-hours, a shared machine across records disclosed rather than quietly double-counted, and a weekend-spanning stoppage split into stretches that all price at the rate in force when the stoppage began.

The principle: people and machines are priced once each, on stated rates, at the stoppage's own start date.

The permit that pointed at nothing

A raise names a permit as the work held up — but nothing is placed under the permit yet, so there is no crew to count. The raise is accepted anyway, with the one honest sentence at submit: send it anyway — then place your work and the count opens up. Once the crew is placed, the completion picker expands the permit to the crew beneath it, pre-ticked and strikeable, and the count rests on real work.

The principle: a record is never refused for missing paperwork — but a crew figure has to rest on placed work, and the flow says exactly what's missing.

The clash becomes a blocker

A red clash on the noticeboard turns out to be a real stoppage. Declared from the clash itself, the record pre-fills the cause and offers the clash's start time as a labelled one-tap suggestion beside the field — never typed in for you. Confirmed with a responsible firm named, the accused firm finds the record in its Blamed listing and contests the attribution: a voice on the record, marked wherever the figure travels, subtracting nothing.

The principle: being blamed comes with a place to say so — and saying so is a mark on the figure, not a discount of it.

The emergency exclusion

A burst main forces an exclusion area overnight; Halden declares the stoppage for the affected firms. A scheduled exclusion area is real work too — it can carry the basis, bound the window, and place the loss. The overnight close splits at the crew's actual presence, and the confirm bundle shows the whole declared window with its stretches inside it.

The principle: whatever the emergency, the record keeps the same shape — declared window, real basis, split at close, one decision.

Part three — counting honestly

A week with nothing to declare

Fairhurst loses no time all week — and still answers. From the flag mirror on their own panel (or recorded in the room by Cora, marked on the firm's word), a nil return lands against the week's line: dated, signed, superseded the moment a real record is filed.

The principle: an empty figure should be a stated answer, not a silence someone later has to interpret.

The safety adviser walks the frame

Hana finds Steelcraft's crew standing and raises it about their work. She can attach their work to the record as a proposal — each chip marked with who proposed it — but the flow offers her no count anywhere: how many of Steelcraft's people stopped is Steelcraft's answer. Their completion endorses or strikes her proposed chips and speaks the numbers.

The principle: anyone can point at the work; only the firm that owns the crew answers for the count.

Blame lands on the honest

Ridgeline raises its own stoppage honestly — and the confirm names Ridgeline responsible. The optional whose doing was this? tag a raiser can add is only ever a suggestion, shown to the confirmer and nobody else; blame lands only at confirm, and an un-blame (the responsible re-decided later) notifies the firm it releases. Self-blame is ordinary and contestable like any other.

The principle: attribution is the adjudicator's act, on the record, reversible on the record — never an accusation that lands by default.

The site goes dark

A storm closes the site for everyone. That is five firms' records, not one — a loss always names whose work stopped, so a site-wide event is one declaration per firm, each confirmed with the first-class answer "Nobody — no firm at fault". The ledger's cause view groups the storm's records by day, so "Tuesday's weather" is readable without anyone inventing a weather-day record.

The principle: there is no ownerless loss — a site-wide event is each firm's own record, and "nobody at fault" is an answer, not a blank.

Raised in error

A record raised against the wrong site should never have existed. Remove takes it — with a required reason, stated on the row rather than erasing it — but only because it is truly bare: no count, no close, no decision, no evidence, nothing pointing at it. The same gesture on an established record is refused with its ground named ("this record has been counted… reject it with a reason, or correct it"), because removing it would take a figure out of the ledger with nothing said. The reason field carries the standing reminder that a crew moved to other work still counts — rejection is for a loss that didn't happen, not for a gang that found something else to do.

The principle: the ledger has one gate — correct a wrong figure, reject a wrong claim with a reason, and remove only what never became a record.

Part four — the meeting, the money, the register

Friday, 07:30 — the programme meeting

The weekly meeting reads three surfaces in one sitting: the work plan's accounting cells (which late lines have a stated loss behind them, which are unaccounted, which can't be checked), the ledger's marks (contested, disputed, changed since confirm — all room-visible on paper), and the weekly itself — the full copy for the principal contractor, the distribution copy, minus every £ line, for the room.

The principle: the meeting reads reconciliations and marks, not verdicts — and the copy that leaves the room carries no money.

Money under correction

Quinn discovers Ridgeline's labour rate was entered wrong. The fix is a correction row — append-only, reason required, with an impact preview naming every confirmed record that re-prices and every issued sheet that printed the old figure. The issued weekly keeps its ink; re-opened in the app it says live figures have moved since issue, and the next issue prints its supersession line.

The principle: money history is never edited — it is corrected on the record, with the blast radius shown before you commit.

A rate needs a denominator

The safety board wants an injury frequency rate. The rate needs declared exposure hours: each month submitted by the commercial side, accepted by the safety band — never the same person — chased until decided. Below three complete months there is no rate at all; after that the figure always carries its coverage ("2.43 · 3 of 5 mo"), and a thin denominator can only make the rate read worse, never better.

The principle: a rate is only as honest as its denominator, so the denominator is declared, four-eyed, and shown on the figure's face.

The hoist gate and the fifteen-day clock

A worker is hurt at the hoist gate. Capture asks who employs them and whether work stopped; the register opens its case, and a stoppage record is drafted for the employer — no headcount asked at the scene of an injury. As the person's absence runs, the register derives the day count and the reporting duty, and the deadline chip counts down; recording the report made discharges it on the row. The employer's panel, meanwhile, is asked for the crew count the draft still lacks — two currencies, two surfaces, never added.

The principle: the injury and the stoppage are two records in two currencies — the system connects them without ever blending them.

The register's hard cases

The edge cases the register is built for: an absence entered as Mon–Fri rows breaks its own run across the uncovered weekend — flagged on the row, correctable, never a silent under-count; a death within a year of a reportable injury re-opens the case under the look-back, on its own clock; and every duty with a deadline chases its owner with a case count and a date — never a name — until the facts on the row discharge it. (The register recording above, on the hoist-gate scene, films this same surface — the two scenes share one clip.)

The principle: the register stores facts and derives duties — and where a derivation could be read two ways, it says which reading it used.

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Next: How lost time is counted · Reading the ledger · Your firm's panel

Blockers & lost time guide: Overview · Reviewing & triaging · Raising · How lost time is counted · The ledger · Your firm's panel · Slip & nil returns · Standing cost · The register · Scene by scene · Reference