One field app that ties site progress, timekeeping and payment applications together

Information from site usually disappears into a WhatsApp group: which trade finished on which floor, how many workers the subcontractor actually had on site, who signed off the concrete pour. At the end of the month everyone tries to reconstruct it from memory around the payment-application table. The job of a field app is to capture that information the moment it happens, tied to the right location and backed by evidence.

How many separate apps does this need?

  • 01

    Field app (site manager, foreman, inspection engineer)

    Progress tracking broken down by block, floor and unit; GPS and timestamped photos; opening and closing punch-list items; concrete pour and rebar approval requests; offline capture inside enclosed structures.

  • 02

    Subcontractor and timekeeping app

    Gang leaders clock their own workers in at the site gate by QR or face verification, report the quantity of work completed that day, and submit the measured quantities that feed the payment application for approval on site.

  • 03

    HSE and quality inspection app

    Site walk checklists for HSE officers and quality teams, non-conformance and near-miss records, periodic scaffold and crane inspection tracking, plus alerts for training and vocational certificate expiry.

  • 04

    Management web panel

    For head office: schedule variance by project and block, payment application file generation, subcontractor contract and deduction tracking, photo archive, progress reporting and permission management.

What the app includes

  • Progress entry per work item in a block-floor-unit tree
  • Scanning a QR tag at the floor entrance to auto-tag the location
  • Concrete pour request stays locked until rebar and formwork are approved
  • Pour record capturing test cubes, slump value and air temperature
  • Punch list item opened with a photo, closed only with a second photo
  • Three-step subcontractor flow: pick day, tick the crew, enter quantities
  • Live progress-payment accrual from contract unit prices, minus deductions
  • Attendance entry blocked outside the site geofence
  • Due-date alerts for scaffolding, crane and boom lift inspections
  • Site-entry warning when a worker's safety training or vocational certificate expires
  • Near-miss and non-conformity reports filed with a voice note
  • Daily site diary auto-generated as PDF with crew, weather and plant

State of the sector

In construction, competitive pressure comes straight from cost control. Material prices and subcontractor unit rates change constantly, so a firm that cannot see daily how much work has genuinely been completed only notices the variance in the month it cuts the payment application. Photos posted into WhatsApp groups cannot be found a week later, and timekeeping kept in a paper ledger turns into a reconciliation argument with the subcontractor. On top of that, contractors working on public tenders or for institutional investors are now expected to produce regular progress reports, HSE records and photographic evidence of work done. A firm that cannot produce these gets paid late even when it wins the job.

Metrics that matter here

  • Schedule variance (planned versus completed work) — Because progress is recorded daily, variance shows up the same week rather than at month-end, leaving time to act.
  • Punch-list closure time — Every outstanding item is opened with a photo and assigned to an owner, so the backlog that normally piles up before handover clears earlier.
  • Waiting time for concrete pour and progress approvals — Approval requests reach the right person by push notification, so idle time for truck mixers and crews falls measurably.
  • Subcontractor payment reconciliation gap — Timekeeping and measured quantities sit on the same record, narrowing the gap between what the subcontractor declares and what gets certified.

Common mistakes in this sector

  • Building the work breakdown too deep A structure that splits every activity into hundreds of sub-items never gets filled in on site; the foreman picks the nearest item and the data degrades. Start with the items that drive payment applications and go deeper only where a real need appears.
  • Leaving offline support until later An app that assumes connectivity fails on its first day in the basement, and the site team goes straight back to WhatsApp. Offline capture and synchronisation belong in the first release; bolting them on afterwards means rewriting the architecture.
  • Giving subcontractors the office screen Handing the subcontractor the same interface as the contractor panel exposes data they should not see and kills adoption at the same time. The subcontractor side should be a separate, plain flow with three or four fields.
  • Collecting photos without tags Photos uploaded without a block, floor, location and work item become unsearchable within six months and carry no evidential value in a dispute. Tagging must be a mandatory field at the moment of capture.

Regulation and compliance

Turkey's Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 requires sites to keep training records, risk assessments, periodic scaffold and lifting equipment inspections and near-miss records; workplace accidents must be reported to SGK (the Turkish social security institution) within three working days. The app should produce these records timestamped and in a form that can be presented during an inspection. Because the minutes and approval flows under Building Inspection Law No. 4708 require wet signatures, digital records support them rather than replace them. Worker location data and especially biometric data such as facial images are treated as special categories under KVKK (Turkey's data protection law, aligned with GDPR), so explicit consent, a privacy notice and a defined retention period are mandatory. Subcontractor payment invoices must be issued in line with the e-Fatura/e-Arşiv (mandatory e-invoicing) rules.

The real challenges in this sector

  • No mobile signal in basements or during structural works

    Cellular signal drops off behind shear walls, in lift shafts and on basement levels. Every record, photo and checklist flow has to write straight to a local database on the device; photos should be compressed on the handset and queued, then uploaded in chunks once signal returns. Because two foremen may work offline on the same work item, conflict resolution has to be designed record by record — last-write-wins will corrupt your measured quantities.

  • Proving which unit a photo actually belongs to

    During structural works every floor looks identical, and nobody reviewing a photo later can tell whether it shows unit 3 on the seventh floor. GPS, a barometric altitude estimate, date and time, and the selected block-floor-location tag should be embedded at the moment of capture, with a tamper-proof server-side record alongside the EXIF data. In practice, sticking a QR label at each floor entrance and scanning it is the single most effective way to cut floor mix-ups.

  • Timekeeping and payment quantities that don't reconcile

    Gang leaders report timekeeping in man-days while payment applications are cut from measured quantities; keep the two in separate systems and month-end turns into an argument. The app should tie the daily timesheet and the quantity of work declared that day to the same record, multiply it by the contract unit rate and show an accrued payment figure in real time. Deductions (advances, materials, HSE penalties) should be applied on the same screen.

  • Concrete pour approval chains that have to close within hours

    You cannot order concrete before rebar and formwork are signed off; if the truck mixer waits you pay a penalty, and if you fall behind you lose a day. The pour request should be built as a time-limited workflow through the inspection engineer and the independent building inspector, with notifications loud enough to be heard while a phone is on silent. Cube sampling, slump and air temperature records belong on the same form.

  • Gloved hands, dust and a screen you cannot read in sunlight

    On site, phones are used with work gloves, dusty screens and direct sunlight overhead. Touch targets need to be large, critical flows should take no more than three taps, and a high-contrast field theme should be offered. Prefer pick lists and voice notes over long forms. Battery is the other constraint: with location and camera running constantly the phone dies mid-shift, so location sampling should be reduced to the moment a progress record is created.

Required integrations

  • Matching workers and HSE officers against SGK e-Bildirge (Turkey's social security declaration system) and İSG-KATİP (the national occupational safety registry)
  • Issuing subcontractor payment invoices through e-Fatura/e-Arşiv (Turkey's mandatory e-invoicing system) in a format compliant with GİB (the Turkish Revenue Administration)
  • Transferring payment applications and cost data to accounting and ERP systems such as Logo, Mikro or Netsis (Turkish ERP vendors)
  • Site turnstiles and personnel access control systems based on QR codes or facial recognition
  • Approval alerts via SMS and WhatsApp Business gateways such as Netgsm and İletimerkezi (Turkish messaging providers)
  • Weather data to plan concrete pours, plastering and facade work around site conditions

Who this page is for

  • Regional housing developer running two or three sites

    The priority is payment reconciliation and schedule slippage. Phases one and two belong together: unless production records, subcontractor attendance and unit-price accrual ship in the same release, the month-end argument continues.

  • Subcontractor firm taking structural or MEP packages

    They need to prove their own crew and quantities to the main contractor. A narrow scope suffices: attendance, daily quantity declarations, tagged photos and a one-tap PDF payment file. Safety inspection modules and ERP bridges can wait.

  • Infrastructure contractor newly bidding on public tenders

    They must hand the authority regular progress reports, safety records and photographic evidence of work done. The scope has to survive an audit: timestamped records, equipment inspection tracking, near-miss logs and an auto-generated site diary come first.

A phased plan that splits the budget

  1. 1

    Phase 1 — Production tracking and verifiable photo records on one site 5-7 hafta

    Delivers the block-floor-unit tree, progress entry per work item, QR location matching, offline capture with a photo upload queue, punch list open-close and a progress report in the web panel. It stands alone from day one: site information lands in a searchable archive instead of chat groups.

  2. 2

    Phase 2 — Subcontractor attendance and progress-payment accrual 4-6 hafta

    Adds a separate, deliberately minimal app for crew leaders, geofenced attendance, daily quantity declarations, live accrual from contract unit prices and deductions for advances, materials and penalties. This order is necessary: without the Phase 1 production records, the payment quantities have no evidence behind them.

  3. 3

    Phase 3 — Safety inspections, accounting transfer and multiple sites 4-6 hafta

    Brings site walk checklists, non-conformity and near-miss flows, equipment inspection and certificate expiry alerts, transfer of payments and costs to the accounting software, a link to Turkey's e-Fatura/e-Arşiv e-invoicing system, and a multi-site structure with per-project permissions. Integration comes last because the item and deduction structure only settles during the first two phases.

Typical scope and timeline

Typical scope: iOS and Android field app, subcontractor timekeeping app, management web panel; block-floor-location tree, offline working and photo upload queue, progress and punch-list tracking, HSE checklists, payment accruals driven by contract unit rates, role-based permissions, PDF report output, store release and training for the site team.

Estimated timeline: 12-18 weeks

Off-the-shelf or custom build?

Topic Off-the-shelf Custom build
Setup speed and day one A ready-made site tool opens the same week and is often more than enough for photos and checklists on a single site. Custom development takes weeks; the work-item tree and contract structure must be mapped before the first release.
Progress payments and deductions Packaged tools ship a fixed payment template; if your unit price list and deduction items do not fit, the team falls back to spreadsheets. Attendance, quantities and deductions sit on one record and the output mirrors the payment form you already use, so reconciliation disputes shrink.
Accounting and e-invoicing link Some established packages ship a ready bridge to common Turkish accounting systems such as Logo or Mikro, and where it exists it genuinely solves the problem. Custom work means building that bridge from scratch at a cost, but subcontractor invoicing and cost-centre mapping follow your own accounting logic.
Data ownership and moving the archive When the subscription ends, the tagged photo archive and records are limited to whatever export format is offered, which makes evidence harder to reach in a dispute. The database and photo storage stay in your own account, so raw records and timestamps are directly available for audits or litigation.

Sector glossary

Hakediş (interim progress payment)
The amount owed to a subcontractor or contractor for work actually completed in a period, priced at contract unit rates with deductions removed. It is the most disputed document at month end on any site.
Metraj (measured quantity take-off)
The measurable quantity of completed work: cubic metres of concrete, square metres of plaster, tonnes of rebar. Because payment is based on it, the quantity declared on site has to be evidenced.
Puantaj (daily crew attendance record)
The daily record of which worker was on which site for how many hours, kept by the crew leader. On day-rate work it is the second basis for payment alongside measured quantities.
Punch list (snag list)
The list of missing or defective items found while walking units before handover, each with an owner and a photo. Provisional acceptance waits until it is cleared, so it directly drives the handover schedule.
Küp numune (concrete test cube)
A sample taken from a concrete pour and crushed in a lab to verify strength. If the pour, the truck and the location are not recorded, the lab result cannot later be tied back to the concrete it came from.

Frequently asked questions

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