Why use Telegram for site reports at all?
A site manager spends the day outdoors with a phone in hand. Asking them to learn a new program, or to fill in a form in the evening from memory, is how reports arrive late or not at all. Telegram is already installed, so the only new habit is one entry per work package, with a percent done, a note and photos.
The alternative is rarely no report at all. It is usually a photo sent privately to one person, who then retypes the figure into a spreadsheet. Every retyped figure is a chance for an error, and the original photo is lost in the chat. A structured entry keeps the figure and the photo together, on the milestone they belong to.
Telegram is a messaging app run by a third party, and the reports pass through it. Decide whether that fits your company rules for site data before you start, and do not put anything in a report that you would not put in a chat.
What does a site manager actually send?
A fact is progress on one milestone: the percent done, a short note and up to five photos. The Mini App opens inside Telegram, shows the work packages of the project, lets the user pick one and sends the entry. Photos are added in the Mini App, not through the chat, and the browser resizes each one before it is sent.
Photo habits matter as much as the words. Take each photo from the same position as the last one, so the office can compare progress by eye. Include something that shows the scale, such as a level or a door frame. Each photo is stored with its entry, so a photo taken on the wrong floor is an error that can be seen later.
A fact is a dated observation, not a status. Saying that a floor is 60% done on a given day is useful; saying that the project is going well is not something the system can use.
Where does the bot fit in?
The bot is for quick questions, not for reports. It answers /status with the progress of the phases, /mine with your own last entries, /app to open the Mini App and /help with the list of commands. Anything else is not guessed at: it is passed to the controller, who answers it. The bot does not take photos.
The bot also works in the other direction. Critical and high signals go to the people responsible by Telegram, and an entry that has been flagged by the checks reaches the controller in the same way, with a button to acknowledge it.
What happens to a report after it is sent?
Six checks run on every entry before it is saved. They flag progress lower than the last entry, a big jump in one entry, 100% while an earlier work package of the phase is unfinished, a date in the future or too far in the past, 100% without a note, and progress on a phase that has not started. The person sees the warning and may confirm with an explanation.
The checks run again on every stored entry, and a flagged one goes to the controller in Telegram with a button to acknowledge it. Each fact then becomes a journal entry on its milestone, with its author, date, note and photos. Progress is never typed over: a new figure is a new entry, and a lower figure needs a note with the reason.
What does the office see when a site stops reporting?
When an active phase has no new fact for seven days, the people responsible get a signal. A missing report is shown as missing, and no forecast is built on top of it. A spreadsheet or a chat group rarely makes silence visible; it just goes quiet.
Silence is also information about the site. A phase that reported every day and then stopped for three days needs a phone call, not a guess in a spreadsheet. The signal is the prompt to ask what happened, and the answer is a fact to enter, not a figure to type in from memory.
The same rule covers the schedule. A milestone with no progress has no forecast end date, because a linear forecast needs progress and a start in the past. The schedule shows the gap instead of an optimistic guess. The field facts module and the signals module describe the checks and the warnings in detail.
What are the limits, and how does Reperline handle them?
Telegram has limits that the product inherits, and a plan should allow for them:
- Sending a fact needs a connection, because Telegram does. There is no offline entry on site.
- The Mini App is in English only. The office interface is in Russian and English.
- The bot does not take photos, so photos always go through the Mini App.
- A site manager needs an account. The owner links their Telegram account to their user, and an unknown Telegram account cannot sign in.
What does a sensible daily reporting routine look like?
The routine matters more than the tool. A site manager who reports at the same times each day, against the same work packages, produces a record the office can read at a glance. A report sent once a week from memory produces a record nobody trusts. A simple routine has four parts, and each one takes a few minutes.
- At the start of the shift, look at the phase you are working on and the percent it was last reported at.
- At the end of the shift, enter one fact for each work package that moved, with the percent done as it is on site, not as it was planned.
- Add a note for every figure that is lower than before, and for every 100% that closes a work package.
- Take photos where the work is hardest to describe in words, such as installations that are about to be covered.
How does Reperline handle site reports?
Reperline takes reports from Telegram, checks them on arrival and keeps every entry in its own database, with its author, its date and its history. It does not replace a daily report template that a client may require, and it does not decide what a delay costs. What it does is make sure the facts that reach the office are dated, attributed to a person and checked, and that a silent site becomes a visible event.
Notes should read as facts a stranger could check. Office staff read them weeks later, and "going well" tells them nothing, while "floor 3 east, formwork stripped, rebar for the next pour waiting" tells them what happened. The six checks then catch the entries that do not fit, and the controller acknowledges a flagged entry while the entry stays in the journal.
Telegram on site and Claude in the office are included on every plan, with unlimited users. The plans are on the pricing page. For the early warning side of the same reports, read early warning systems in construction. The templates page offers a free site report checklist as an XLSX file.