A site is not a warehouse

Three numbers treated as one

Material is purchased against a site, issued to it, and consumed in the work. Purchase gets recorded because an invoice forces it. Consumption is what the job actually cost. Issue is the step in between, and it is the one nobody captures.

Without it there is no way to tell an over-ordering problem from a wastage problem from a material-walked-off-site problem, and those want three different responses.

What actually survives on site

Any control that requires returning to an office at the end of the day will be completed from memory or not at all. Any control requiring a desktop will not be completed.

What survives is a two-field note captured on a phone at the moment of handover: what, how much, who took it. That is enough to make the reconciliation possible and short enough that a site engineer will actually do it forty times a week.

The surplus nobody books back

A job finishes with material left over. It goes on a truck, back to the yard, and into nobody's records. The finished site is costed as though it consumed everything, and the next site quietly uses free material.

Both jobs are now wrong, in opposite directions, which is worse than a single error because it makes the comparison between them meaningless.