The super asks where you are on the third floor. You say about 60 percent. You mean the whole job.
Floor 2 is buttoned up. Floor 3 is half roughed in. Floor 5 hasn’t been touched. A number for the whole building hides all of that, and it’s the floor-by-floor answer the GC actually needs before he calls the next trade in.
Here’s how to track progress by floor and room in LogLoon, and what it does and doesn’t tell you.
Why One Number Doesn’t Work
A job-wide percent complete is an average. It’s fine for a one-line update and useless for a decision. Which floor can the drywall crew start on? Where is your crew going tomorrow? Which floor is ready to bill?
Those are location questions. The sub who can answer them from his own record is in a better spot than the sub who’s reconstructing it from memory when the GC asks.
Set Up the Tree Once
Cost codes tell you what kind of work is happening. Locations tell you where. You build them once, on the project’s Overview tab.
Switch the progress section from Cost Codes to Locations and add your locations. Each one is a Building, Floor, Room, or Area, and you nest them however the job is laid out. A high-rise goes Building, Floor, Room. A single-story warehouse might be nothing but Areas. You can nest up to five levels.
Rearranging is drag and drop. Drop a location onto another to nest it, use the arrows to move it out or into the one above, or check several and move or delete them together.
The setup step that saves the most time comes next: when you add a Floor or a Building, pick the plan sheet that shows it. That one link does the work later.
Draw the Rooms on the Sheet
Open the floor plan from the Plans tab, pick the location tool, and drag a box around a room. Name it, or place one you already created. Because the floor is linked to that sheet, every room you draw on it files itself inside that floor. Nothing to sort afterward.
Click a room to move it, drag a corner to resize it, or rename it. If you take a room off the sheet, it comes off the drawing but stays in your tree, so nothing is lost.
Draw rooms on the floor plan, not on a ceiling plan or an electrical plan. Task pins land where the work is drawn, and you want them landing on the plan the crew uses.
Pin the Work and It Tags Itself
This is the part that keeps the record honest without extra typing.
Drop a task pin inside a room and the task picks up that room. Move the pin to a different room and the tag follows it. If you’d rather set it by hand, open the task and pick the location. That works on web and on the phone.
On the Tasks tab you can filter by location. Pick a floor and you get everything on it, room by room. Pinned tasks already carry their status color on the sheet, so a glance at a floor plan shows what’s open and what’s done.
Read Progress by Floor
On the Overview tab, the Locations view shows progress broken out by area instead of by cost code. There’s no percent complete to type in. It’s calculated.
Tasks with a budgeted quantity roll up as installed versus budgeted. For example, a floor with 2,400 SF of board budgeted and 1,800 SF installed reads as 75 percent. Tasks without quantities count finished tasks against total tasks.
Numbers roll up the tree. A floor shows the total of every room inside it, and a building shows the total of its floors. When someone asks where you are on the third floor, you read the answer off the screen.
Progress by location backs up your draw the same way progress by cost code does: specific, and tied to real work instead of a guess.
In the Field
The foreman doesn’t need to build any of this. On the phone he sees the room outlines on the plan sheet, sees which room a task is in, and can change a task’s room from the task screen. Pinning a task inside a room tags it there too. The progress screen switches between Cost Codes and Locations.
What It Doesn’t Do
Locations track work, not hours. Progress by location is built from tasks, so it tells you installed versus budgeted, not hours by room. Hours still roll up by cost code, which is where labor overruns show up.
Building the tree and drawing rooms happens on the web. The field reads what the office set up.
And this isn’t the only tool that organizes work by location. Fieldwire and others do it too. What makes it useful to a sub is the setup: rooms drawn right on the sheet, tasks that tag themselves when you pin them, and progress that adds up floor by floor without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
Where to Start
Don’t build every room on day one. Add your floors, link each to its sheet, and draw rooms on the floor you’re working on now. The tree fills in as the job moves.
For the full setup steps, see the Locations guide. For how the same pins work on a closeout list, see punch list app, and for the sheet side, construction plan viewer.
See how LogLoon’s progress tracking works, or check the pricing — it’s on the website.