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Weekly Construction Progress Report Tool
Type what happened on the job this week the way you'd say it out loud. River turns it into a progress report a homeowner understands and a lender will accept — plus a running issues log.
The weekly update is the cheapest insurance a builder has and the first thing that falls off when the job gets busy. Owners who get a report every Friday do not call on Tuesday asking what is happening. Owners who hear nothing for three weeks assume the worst, and the conversation you eventually have is much more expensive than the report would have been.
This tool is built around how contractors actually capture information, which is not in a template. You type what happened the way you would say it standing in the driveway — trades, what got done, what slipped, what you are waiting on. River turns that into a report organized by trade, with schedule status, weather impact, open items, and next week's plan, written in language a homeowner understands without translation.
It also does the thing that protects you later. Delays, weather days, decisions you are waiting on, and materials that arrived wrong all get recorded as dated facts in a running log. When a schedule dispute comes up in month seven, the contemporaneous record you built one Friday at a time is the thing that settles it.
What makes a progress report that actually does its job
The report has three audiences and they want different things. The homeowner wants to know whether their house is on track and whether they need to do anything. The lender, if there is a construction loan, wants percentage-complete by trade tied to the draw schedule. And you want a dated record of every delay you did not cause. A good weekly report serves all three without being three documents, which mostly means being specific about dates and percentages rather than writing 'good progress this week.'
Recording what you are waiting on is the part that pays for itself. Selections not made, decisions not given, change orders not signed, inspections not scheduled — each one is a delay in the making, and each one is only defensible later if you documented that you flagged it at the time. Writing 'need tile selection by the 15th or the master bath slips' in week nine is what stops the argument in week fourteen. Say it in the report, in writing, every week it stays open.
Weather deserves its own line even in a good week. Lost days accumulate invisibly, and a contract with a weather-day provision is worthless without a contemporaneous record of which days were lost and to what. Two rain days noted in a Friday report cost you one sentence and can be worth weeks of schedule relief on a job that runs long.
How it works
Dump your field notes
Type it however it comes out. Shorthand, trade slang, and half sentences are fine.
River organizes it by trade
Progress, schedule status, weather, open items, and next week's plan, structured for the owner.
Check the flagged gaps
Anything ambiguous comes back as a question rather than a guess about your job.
Send it, then do it again Friday
The workspace keeps the history, so next week starts from what is already open.
What you get
- A progress report organized by trade, in language an owner understands
- Schedule status with delays attributed and dated
- Open items and decisions the owner owes you, with deadlines
- Weather and site conditions recorded for schedule protection
- A running issues log you can carry week to week
- A workspace that keeps every week's report, so the project history builds itself
Common questions
Will it make up progress I did not report?
No. The report contains only what you wrote, reorganized and expanded into clear language. If you did not mention a trade, it will not appear with an invented status. Where something is genuinely ambiguous — you wrote 'plumbing going' and the report needs a percentage — it asks or marks it for you to fill in rather than picking a number. On a document that may end up attached to a draw request, an invented percentage is a serious problem.
Can I use this for a construction loan draw?
It produces the narrative progress report that usually accompanies a draw request, with trade-by-trade completion. It does not produce the lender's draw schedule or AIA forms, and the completion percentages are the ones you provide, not an independent assessment. Most builders attach this alongside their draw paperwork rather than in place of it.
What if I only have five minutes?
Five minutes of typing is enough. The input is designed around the realistic case where you are writing this in the truck at the end of the day. Short, messy, and out of order still produces a usable report — more detail makes it better, but the tool is built for the minimum, not the ideal.
Does this work for remodels and commercial, or just new homes?
It works for any project where you report progress to an owner or a lender. The structure is trade-based, which fits residential new construction and remodels most naturally. Commercial projects with formal schedule-of-values reporting have heavier requirements this does not replace, though the narrative sections still apply.
How do I keep the reports consistent week to week?
Everything stays in a workspace rather than an inbox, so each new report starts with the previous week's open items already in front of it. That is what keeps an issue from silently disappearing between week four and week nine, which is the usual failure mode with reports written from scratch in email.
Weekly Construction Progress Report Tool
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.