Daily Production Reports, Built by an Agent

The crew records headcount and installed quantities once, in the field. The agent turns that into the daily production report in the company's own spreadsheet template — ready for the superintendent to check and send.

The problem

Every solar job runs on a daily production report: manpower by cost code, quantities installed, weather, delays, notes. The numbers already exist by mid-afternoon — in a foreman's notebook, a headcount text, a stack of delivery tickets. The superintendent's evening goes to re-typing them into a spreadsheet, then re-typing the same manpower into the project platform's daily log, then reconciling the two when they don't match.

The work isn't hard; it's pure transcription, done at the worst time of day, and it's where small errors creep in — a crew of nine becomes ten, racking hours land on the module cost code, and payroll has to chase the discrepancy at the end of the week.

How the agent workflow works

1. The foreman captures the day once: a photo of the field tally sheet or delivery ticket, plus a short voice note or text with crew count, hours, and quantities installed by area.
2. The agent reads the captures, extracts names, hours, and quantities, and maps labor to the project's cost codes — racking, modules, wire management, ballast, conductor, raceway, supervision.
3. Quantities are checked against the plan set totals for that block or roof section, so an entry that puts more modules down than the section holds gets flagged instead of filed.
4. The agent fills the company's standard report template with values only. Formatting, formulas, and dropdowns are never touched — the file that comes back looks exactly like the one the office expects.
5. The same verified numbers roll up into the daily log entry for the project platform, so the spreadsheet and the platform match by construction, not by hope.
6. The superintendent reviews a draft with anything uncertain highlighted, corrects it in one pass, and sends. Nothing goes out without that review.

What you need to set it up

• The current report template file, locked as the master copy — the agent writes into a fresh copy each day, never the original.
• The project's cost code list and crew roster, so names and codes resolve the same way every time.
• A capture habit the crew will actually keep: one photo, one voice note, sent to a single email address or chat channel.
• An agent platform with spreadsheet and email access, plus a named human approver for every outgoing report.

Where it breaks

Handwriting defeats it regularly. A tally sheet photographed at an angle, in glare, with a foreman's shorthand ("JD + 2, half day wire") will produce misreads, and a smudged 7 becomes a 1. The agent also cannot verify physical quantities — if the field count says 240 modules and 228 went down, the report will faithfully repeat the wrong number; it checks arithmetic and plan limits, not reality. Crew splits across cost codes mid-day are another weak spot: the agent allocates the way it was told, even when the day didn't actually break that way. Every one of these is why the review step is not optional. The agent removes the typing, not the superintendent's judgment.

The bottom line

Best fit for superintendents running multi-crew jobs with a fixed daily template and a payroll or PM chain that depends on it. In practice it turns the evening report from a rebuild into a review — the numbers are captured once, in the field, and everything downstream is a copy of a checked original.