Thursday, 7.40 in the morning. The contractor has sent a photo of a steel beam on WhatsApp with the message 'this right?'. There is also an email from the site manager about a drainage run, and a voice note you have not listened to yet. By 9 there will be two more.
None of this is unusual. On a live site a small practice can take fifteen to thirty queries a week, spread across email, WhatsApp, text and the odd phone call. The answers are mostly in the drawings or in something you already told them in March. The problem is that nothing holds the questions in one place, so the same one gets asked twice and the one that matters sits unread under a photo of a skip.
Each message gets the same treatment. The system works out which project it belongs to from the sender and the words in it. It gives the query a number, RFI-041 say, and a date. It files the photo against the project. Then it looks at the drawing set for that project, the specification, and every earlier reply you have given on that site, and writes a draft answer.
The draft is a draft. Sometimes it says 'see detail 12 on A-501, beam size as scheduled' and that is the whole reply. Sometimes it says 'this is not covered in the issued drawings, you will need to decide'. You read it, change what needs changing, and send it from your own email or WhatsApp. The reply is logged against the same number.
At 8 every morning you get one email: open queries, by project, oldest first, with how many days each has been waiting. Three on the Hackney job, one on the barn, none on the school. The list is also in a Google Sheet if you want to sort it.
When the contractor says later that nobody answered the question about the lintel, the register says RFI-023, asked 14 May, answered 15 May at 11.12, reply attached. This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts. How many queries from last week are still sitting in WhatsApp?