What is a manpower report in construction?

A record of who was on which job, each day, and for how long — by crew or by trade, with the hours and a line about the work. The daily version is the log; the weekly version adds it up, sets it against the men you planned, and is what the GC, the owner and your own Friday meeting actually read. On larger jobs the GC requires it; on every job it is the evidence behind a delay claim and the number behind your productivity.

What should a daily manpower report include?

The date, the job, the crew or foreman, the trade or classification, the men on site, the hours split straight time, overtime and double time, the work performed and where, and the weather, delays and visitors that explain a thin day. Written by the foreman who ran the day, the same day. The Daily Log tab in the template is exactly those columns.

What is the difference between a daily and a weekly manpower report?

Granularity and audience. The daily report is one line per crew per day and exists to be filed while the details are real. The weekly report is a grid — jobs or crews down the side, the six working days across — with men-days actual against men-days planned, the hours, and a summary: peak day, average per day, overtime share. GCs ask for the daily one; you run the business on the weekly one.

How do you calculate man-days?

Men on site times days worked. A crew of seven working five days is 35 man-days; the template calls them men-days and sums them per row and per day. Two checks keep the number honest: men-days times eight should land near the straight-time hours, and the planned figure should be the look-ahead’s bottom row added up, not a guess made on Friday.

What is the difference between a manpower report and a timesheet?

A timesheet is per person and exists to pay them — hours by day, ST/OT/DT, job-coded. A manpower report is per crew and per job and exists to show presence and allocation: how many men, where, on which day, against the plan. One feeds the other. The report should be built from the timesheets or the daily reports, never from memory.

Does the template work in Google Sheets?

Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Drive and open it with Google Sheets, or use File → Import. The formulas — TEXT, SUM, MAX, COUNTIF, IFERROR — work unchanged, so typing the Monday still fills the day headers and the summary still calculates. Excel for Windows and Mac open it as-is.

Is this template really free?

Yes — the download is the file. No email, no watermark, free to use and share inside your company. We make the software version, where the report comes off the crew board without anyone retyping it; the spreadsheet is the honest first step, and plenty of subs should start here.

Free Weekly Manpower Report Template (Excel + Sheets)

Q: Why do GCs ask subs for manpower reports?

To check that the crew on site matches the look-ahead the sub committed to, to plan site logistics — parking, hoists, gates — and to hold a record. When a job runs late, the first thing a claims reviewer builds is a men-per-day history for every trade; the sub whose reports exist and agree with the GC’s daily log is the one whose delay story holds up.

A manpower report answers one question the GC, the owner, and your own Friday meeting all ask in different words: who was on which job, each day, and was it the crew we said? This is a free Excel version built for a concrete sub running more than one job — men on site per day by job and crew, the men-days you planned against the men-days you worked, the hours, and a summary that writes itself. It comes with a daily log tab, because the weekly report is only as good as the daily counts under it.

Download the Weekly Manpower Report Template (.xlsx) →
Works in Excel and Google Sheets. Free for use within your company.

What the report is for

Three readers, three uses. The GC wants to see that the crew on site matches the look-ahead you committed to on Monday, and on bigger jobs the contract says you owe him the daily count. The owner or PM wants to know whether the job is staffed to plan, before the schedule slips tells him. And you want the number nobody else will produce for you: how many men-days a job actually ate, set against the yards it placed — which is the productivity figure your next bid should be built on.

Then there is the fourth reader, who shows up months later. When a job runs late, the first thing a claims reviewer builds is a men-per-day history for every trade on the site. The sub whose weekly reports exist, are numbered, and agree with the GC’s daily log is the sub whose delay story holds up.

What’s inside

Type one Monday, get the week — enter the Monday in the blue date cell and the six day headers fill themselves. Contractor, prepared by, and who it goes to sit on the same line.
One row per job or crew — cut it the way your GC wants it: a row per job for the company-wide report, or a row per crew and classification for a single project.
Men on site per working day, Monday to Saturday — blank means nobody worked. The bottom row totals men on site per day.
Men-days actual against men-days planned — the planned column comes straight from the look-ahead’s bottom row; the variance column shows where the week drifted, row by row.
ST and OT hours per row — off the timesheets or the daily reports.
“This week at a glance” — seven lines under the totals, all formulas: men-days worked, men-days planned, variance, peak day, average men per working day, total hours, and the overtime share.
A Daily Log tab — forty lines of date, job, crew, trade, men, ST/OT/DT with total hours calculating, work performed, and the weather and delays that explain a thin day. This tab is the daily manpower report if the GC wants one.
Example rows and a legend — blue cells are yours, orange cells calculate; overwrite the examples.
Print-ready — landscape Letter, each tab one page wide.

The three tabs

Tab	What it is	When it gets filled
Weekly Report	The grid you send: jobs or crews by day, men-days against plan, hours, and the summary block.	Friday, from the daily log, in ten minutes.
Daily Log	One line per crew per day — the daily manpower report, with total hours calculating.	Same day, from the foreman’s count or his daily report.
How to Use	The routine in six steps, and what the file can’t do.	Read once.

How to run it in ten minutes a week

Monday: write the plan down. Add up the crew count per day from the look-ahead and put it in the planned column, per job. A plan that only lives in the look-ahead can’t be missed; one written next to the actual can.
Every day: one line per crew in the log. The foreman’s count, the same day, with the hours and a phrase about the work. If he files a daily report, the line is already written — copy it, don’t reconstruct it.
Friday: fill the grid, read the summary, send it. Men per day into the weekly tab, hours from the timesheets, then look at the seven lines before it goes out. One owner, the same day every week. A report that skips a week stops being a record.

Reading the numbers

Variance to plan. Positive means more men than the look-ahead said. Either the plan was light or the job is eating labor — and the difference shows up when you set men-days against the yards placed. A negative variance on a job the GC is watching is the phone call you want to make before he does.
Peak day against average. A crew sized for the peak idles the rest of the week; a crew sized for the average runs overtime on pour day. The gap between the two lines is the case for a floater, a second crew, or a pump.
Overtime share. A pour-day spike is normal. Over about ten percent for a month is a crew-size conversation, not a scheduling one.
Men-days against quantities. Divide the hours by the yards on the daily reports and you have the productivity number, job by job, week by week — the one the bid table can’t give you.

Daily manpower report, or weekly?

Both, and they are the same file. GCs on larger jobs ask for the daily one, usually submitted with the daily report; the template’s Daily Log is that report. The weekly grid is what you read, and what the PM wants on Friday. The rule that keeps both honest is the same as for the daily report: the count comes from the foreman who was there, on the day, not from the office on Friday remembering.

Where the spreadsheet stops

Three honest limits. Every number on it was typed somewhere else first — the daily report, the timesheet, the look-ahead — so the week gets keyed two or three times. Nothing checks the men on the report against the roster or the crew you actually scheduled; a row can claim eight men on a day the board shows five. And the file forgets: last week’s report is a separate file, and the trend across a quarter is a project in itself.

That is the shape of the upgrade when it comes. On the Manpower board, the crew you schedule prefills onto the foreman’s daily report, and the hours he submits flow back into time tracking for that day — nothing typed twice. The weekly readout comes off the same board: Export Schedule (Excel) produces a branded workbook with a Summary of KPI tiles and per-foreman headcount, the full Men Tracker grid, and Project Totals, and Distribute emails that workbook to the whole directory in one step. Analytics draws the manpower curve per project, man-weeks per foreman and utilization by week, and exports a branded PDF, and Projection shows the gap between the crew every job needs and the crew you have — the variance column, a month before it happens.

Send this Friday’s report from it

Take the template and close out this week on it — it’s free either way. And when the retyping, the roster check, and the missing trend start costing you, put one crew on the board and let the report come off it. Planning Ops is built for concrete subs, veteran-owned, with a 14-day free trial and your whole crew riding free as viewers. See the Manpower Board →

The free weekly manpower report template (Excel + Google Sheets)