Daily Progress Report (DPR)
A daily record of work completed, labour deployed, materials consumed, equipment used, and issues encountered on a construction site - the raw data that feeds every project management decision.
What Goes Into a Daily Progress Report
A construction DPR typically captures: work completed today (activity description, quantity achieved, location), labour attendance (trade-wise count of workers on site), material received and consumed, equipment deployed and utilisation hours, weather conditions, site visitors, safety incidents, and issues or hindrances that affected work.
On a large project, the DPR for a single day can run 5-10 pages covering multiple towers, trades, and zones. Multiply that by 500+ working days on a 2-year project, and the DPR becomes the most voluminous document set on any construction project.
The 24-48 Hour Gap That Costs Crores
The standard DPR workflow on most Indian construction sites follows a pattern that hasn't changed in decades.
Evening: The site supervisor fills out a paper form or handwritten register based on the day's work. This is done from memory at the end of a 10-hour day, so accuracy varies.
Next morning: The paper DPR reaches the planning office. A data entry person transfers the information into an Excel sheet.
By afternoon: The compiled DPR is available to the project manager. If it's a multi-tower project, individual tower DPRs need to be consolidated.
Next day: The consolidated report reaches the head office for multi-project review.
This cycle means that leadership decisions are always based on information that's 24-48 hours old - at best.
What Changes When DPR Becomes Real-Time
When a site engineer updates task progress from their phone in real time - marking a task complete with a GPS-tagged photo at the location - the DPR effectively writes itself. Labour data comes from attendance systems. Material consumption is logged at the store. Equipment hours are tracked digitally.
The DPR transforms from a document produced after the fact to a live data feed that updates throughout the day. The project manager doesn't wait for tomorrow's compiled report - they see a dashboard that reflects this morning's site status.
Projects that have moved to real-time DPR reporting consistently show: meeting times reduced (because the first 55 minutes of status updates become unnecessary when everyone sees the same dashboard), faster decision-making on delays (same-day instead of next-week), and more accurate progress tracking (because data is captured at the point of work, not from memory 8 hours later).
DPR Data Quality: The Hidden Challenge
Digital DPR tools solve the speed problem but introduce a new challenge: data quality at source. If a site engineer marks 10 tasks complete in 30 seconds without actually verifying each one, the live dashboard shows fiction faster.
This is why GPS-tagged photos matter. When marking a task complete requires uploading a photo from the actual location - verified by GPS coordinates - the engineer must physically be at the work front and document what they see. It's harder to enter inaccurate data when evidence is required.
Why this matters in construction
The DPR is the single most important data collection point on any construction site. Every schedule update, cost calculation, productivity analysis, and progress review depends on accurate daily reporting from site. Yet on most Indian construction projects, DPRs are filled out at the end of the day from memory, delivered to the planning office the next morning, and entered into the system by end of that day - creating a minimum 24-48 hour gap between what happened on site and what leadership sees in reports.
Related terms
Look-Ahead Schedule
planningA short-term rolling schedule - typically 2 to 4 weeks - that breaks the master plan into daily actionable tasks for site teams, focusing on what's about to happen rather than the full project timeline.
S-Curve
reportingA graphical curve that plots cumulative progress or cost against time, showing planned vs actual trajectory - called an S-curve because healthy projects start slow, accelerate in the middle, and taper off at the end.
Quality Control Checklist
qualityA structured list of inspection points that must be verified and documented at specific construction stages - ensuring work meets specifications, codes, and quality standards before being covered by subsequent work.
How Buildrun Intelligence handles this
Buildrun replaces paper DPRs with mobile-first reporting - site engineers log progress, upload GPS-tagged photos, and record issues in under 30 seconds per task, feeding live dashboards that leadership sees the same hour.