Labour run and weekly planner

Next week exists
in one person's head.

The labour run is where it stops. Every person against every site, weeks and months out, colour-coded by project and readable from the other side of the office.

Book a demo → The view for the wall

A gang working among reinforcement on a slab: the people whose week the labour run allocates

In plain terms

The labour run is the weekly plan of who is going to which site. It is the thing most contractors keep on a whiteboard in the office, or in a spreadsheet one person owns, and it is the single most-asked question in any construction business: where am I on Tuesday, and who have I got on site three.

In Unibuild it is a grid. People down the side, days across the top, each cell holding the project that person is on, coloured by project so a week reads as a pattern rather than as text. It runs weeks and months ahead rather than to the end of the current week, it carries subcontract operatives and agency labour alongside your own people, and it already knows about approved leave and bank holidays before you start planning.

How next week is usually planned

Accurate, current, and visible in exactly one room.

A whiteboard is a good tool. It is just a tool that stops working the moment anybody needs it while standing somewhere else.

The board

Magnets and a marker pen. Genuinely the clearest thing in the building, for the people in the building.

One room, office hours

The spreadsheet

A copy emailed on Friday. By Monday there are four copies and nobody knows which is live.

Four versions of next week

The phone calls

Six a morning, all asking the same question, all answered by the same person.

The plan is a person

The holiday

Approved in April. The man is booked on Tuesday's job and lands in Alicante on Sunday.

A gang short, on the day

The subbies

Planned separately, in a different place, by somebody else, if at all.

Half the labour, off the plan

Beyond Friday

Nobody plans past the end of the week, because the board is only as wide as the wall.

No view of the month

The underlying issue The plan is not written down. It is remembered And the person remembering it takes leave too

Weekly labour runWeeks and months aheadColour coded by projectEvery person, every daySubcontract operativesAgency labourApproved leave overlaidBank holidaysCompany holidaysDay offs with a reasonPer-day notesCopy previous weekLive attendanceOn the phoneOn the wall screenRead only for the board Weekly labour runWeeks and months aheadColour coded by projectEvery person, every daySubcontract operativesAgency labourApproved leave overlaidBank holidaysCompany holidaysDay offs with a reasonPer-day notesCopy previous weekLive attendanceOn the phoneOn the wall screenRead only for the board

What the module does

Six things a whiteboard cannot.

A week you read
as a pattern

Every project carries its own colour, so a cell is recognised before it is read. A gang split across three jobs, a site with nobody on it on Thursday, a week where one project has quietly taken everybody: all of it is visible as shape rather than found by reading names.

People down the side, days across the top
The colour is the project, consistently, everywhere it appears
Which is what makes it work at arm's length
And what makes the wall screen worth putting up

Seen, not readLive

Weeks and months,
not to Friday

The run is not bounded by the width of a wall. Plan the next week properly, then keep going: the shape of a month tells you where you are short before it is somebody's problem on a Monday morning.

Copy the previous week where the plan repeats
Then change the four cells that are actually different
Per-day notes for the thing the grid cannot say
So planning ahead costs minutes rather than an afternoon

Ahead, not just currentLive

Subbies and agency
on the same grid

Subcontract operatives and agency labour are planned in the same run as your own people, because on most jobs they are most of the labour and planning them somewhere else is planning half the job.

Employed staff, agency and subcontract firms on one grid
Marked so they read differently from your own people at a glance
Which is what the site actually looks like on the day
Rather than the half of it you employ directly

Everyone on the gateLive

It already knows
who is away

As the week renders, the run asks for every person and every date whether there is approved leave. On an approved full day the project selector is not drawn at all, so there is no control to click and no allocation to make by mistake.

A half day keeps the selector, because a morning off still leaves an afternoon
Day offs block allocation on the same terms, with a mandatory reason
Prevented at the point of planning, not flagged on the Monday
The planner will not offer you a man who is away

Prevented, not reportedLive

Bank holidays are
a register, not a view

Public and bank holidays, and the company's own non-working days, are a maintained list of named dates that shades both the labour run and the holiday planner. Whether Good Friday is on it is a decision somebody made once, on a date.

Rather than an answer that changes depending on who is asked
Weekends and shaded days are drawn before anybody plans onto them
The same register the leave module counts entitlement against
One list, two modules, no second opinion

Decided once, applied everywhereLive

Checked against
who actually turned up

The plan is cross-referenced with the live QR punches, so the difference between who was allocated to site two and who is standing on site two is visible immediately rather than at the end of the week.

The gap on a site shows up while the day can still be fixed
The same grid is on the phone for whoever is not at a desk
And on the wall screen for the office that keeps being asked
Which is where most of the phone calls stop

Planned against actualLive

Ask to book somebody onto a job he is on holiday for.

It is the fastest way to judge this, because you cannot. Watch somebody try it on the labour run and the control is simply not there to click.

Book a demo → 30 minutes. The demo runs on our own data.

How it fits

What feeds it, and what it feeds.

The run is worth having because of what it reads automatically. On its own it is a nicer whiteboard.

It reads the holiday planner

Leave is requested from the app or the web portal as individual dates, each a full day or a half, and approved by a named committee rather than one supervisor who might be on a roof. The moment it is approved the run stops offering that person. The two are separate modules doing separate jobs: the holiday planner manages entitlement and approval, the labour run decides where people go, and the join between them is the reason either is worth having.

It feeds the wall screen

The same week renders as a read-only board for a television in the office, refreshing itself every two minutes, with no edit control of any kind on the page behind it. A screen on an open office wall cannot alter next week's plan by accident. Changes are made here, by whoever is meant to make them, and the board shows the result within two minutes.

Day offs are not leave

The office needs to record that somebody is unavailable on Thursday for reasons that have nothing to do with annual leave. That is a day off: entered directly on the run with a mandatory reason, not requested and not approved because it is not a request, touching nobody's entitlement, and blocking allocation on exactly the same terms.

People come from one record

Everybody in the run is a row on the personnel record, whether they are on PAYE, trading through their own limited company, supplied by an agency or working for a subcontract firm. Deactivating somebody takes them out of the run's dropdown in the same operation that revokes their app access, so a leaver stops being plannable immediately rather than at the next tidy-up.

More than one company

Where a group runs several businesses, staff belong to a business. Somebody employed by one does not appear in the other's labour run, timesheet grid or dropdowns unless you deliberately give them both. That is what stops a gang being planned onto a job that is not theirs. There is more on running more than one company.

What it does not do

It does not decide who should go where; that judgement is the contracts manager's and stays with them. It does not know a man's competence for a task, though the training matrix holds it on the same personnel record. It will not stop you planning somebody onto two sites on the same day if that is genuinely what you mean. What it removes is the class of mistake nobody makes on purpose: planning a man who is on holiday, and planning a week nobody else can see.

The plan is only half of it. The other half is who turned up.

QR punch in and out on the phone, timed by the server rather than the handset, against the same person and the same project the run allocated.

Workforce and time → Or call the office on UK hours

Questions

Asked by whoever
plans the week.

What is a labour run?+

It is the plan of which people are going to which sites, day by day. Most UK contractors keep one, usually on a whiteboard in the office or in a spreadsheet that one person owns, and it is the document the whole business runs on without ever quite being written down. In Unibuild it is a grid of people against days, with each cell holding the project that person is allocated to and coloured by project so a week is legible at a glance.

How far ahead can we plan?+

Weeks and months, rather than to the end of the current week. That is the practical difference from a wall planner, which is only ever as wide as the wall it is on. Where the plan repeats you copy the previous week and change the cells that are genuinely different, so planning further out costs minutes rather than an afternoon, which is usually why it does not get done.

Can we plan subcontractors' operatives on it?+

Yes, on the same grid as your own people, along with agency labour. On a fit-out or M&E job where most of the gang belongs to somebody else, planning only your direct employees means planning a minority of the site. Subcontract operatives are marked so they read differently from employed staff at a glance, both in the run and on the wall board, so you can see the shape of the labour as well as its total.

How does it know somebody is on holiday?+

It asks. As the week renders, the run checks approved leave for every person and every date. On an approved full day the project selector is not drawn at all, so there is nothing to click and no allocation to make by mistake. A half day keeps the selector, because a morning off still leaves an afternoon somebody has to plan. Leave is managed in the holiday planner, and the moment a request is approved the run reflects it.

Is the labour run the same thing as the holiday planner?+

No. They are two modules with two different jobs and they are frequently confused. The holiday planner manages annual leave: requests, approval, entitlement and the running balance for every person. The labour run plans deployment: who is on which site on which day, weeks ahead. What connects them is one direction of travel, which is that approved leave is read by the run so a man who is away cannot be booked. You would still want the run if nobody ever took a holiday.

Does it show bank holidays?+

Yes, along with public holidays and your own company non-working days. They are a maintained register of named dates rather than a setting somebody remembers, and the same register shades both the labour run and the holiday planner, so whether Good Friday is a working day is a decision made once rather than an answer that changes depending on who you ask. Weekends and shaded days are drawn before anybody plans onto them.

Can we put it on a screen in the office?+

That is what the TV board is: the same week rendered for a television, read only, refreshing itself every two minutes. The page behind it exposes no way to write, so a screen on an open office wall cannot change next week's plan by accident or otherwise. It needs a signed-in session, so it is an internal screen rather than a public link. Putting one up takes an afternoon, once.

Is it on the phone as well?+

Yes. The labour run is one of the modules on the field app, and it behaves identically on the approved-leave rules: a full day empties that day's list the same way the desk version removes the selector. That matters because the person who most often needs to know where somebody is on Tuesday is not sitting at a desk when the question arrives.

What if somebody is not available but it is not annual leave?+

That is a day off, and it is deliberately a different thing. It is entered directly on the labour run with a mandatory reason, it is not requested and not approved because it is not a request, and it does not touch anybody's leave entitlement. It blocks allocation on exactly the same terms as approved leave, and it is reported on its own page, filterable by person and reason, so a pattern of them is visible.

Does it tell us whether people actually went where they were planned?+

It cross-references the live QR punches, so the difference between who was allocated to a site and who has actually clocked in there is visible while the day can still be fixed, rather than at the end of the week. The punch record itself, with server timing and the cost rate in force on the day, sits in workforce and time.

We run more than one company. Do the two get mixed up?+

Not by default. Staff belong to a business, so somebody employed by one does not appear in the other's labour run, timesheet grid or dropdowns unless you deliberately give them both. That is what stops a gang being planned onto a job that is not theirs and stops costs landing on whichever company happened to ask first. Directors, a shared compliance officer and the person doing the group's buying are the usual cases for genuine dual access.

Will it stop us double-booking somebody?+

It prevents the case that is never intentional, which is planning somebody who is on approved leave or has a day off recorded. It will not stop you deliberately putting one person against two jobs on the same day, because on a call-out or a split day that is sometimes exactly what you mean. Deciding who should go where remains the contracts manager's judgement; the module's job is to make that judgement visible to everybody else.

The site modules