The log builds itself
Every RFI is filed against the project, the drawing and the spec section it actually concerns, the moment it arrives. Nobody keeps a spreadsheet in step, because there is no spreadsheet.
Every RFI carries the same four facts: when it came in, who it went to, when it came back, and which discipline it belonged to. Your spreadsheet holds all four and does nothing with them. BuildCycle keeps the log without anyone typing a row — then shows you what those four facts add up to.
Somebody logs it, routes it and chases it. That is a real job and it stays one — at what cost? Every hour spent keeping a spreadsheet honest, updating it, attempting to report on it, or hunting for the entry nobody made is an hour that eats away at your CA fee. BuildCycle makes the entry quick; where Procore is connected, all that is left is deciding who answers. After that the log does the chasing and reports on itself.
Every RFI is filed against the project, the drawing and the spec section it actually concerns, the moment it arrives. Nobody keeps a spreadsheet in step, because there is no spreadsheet.
You decide who answers. After that the acknowledgement, the reminders, and the running count of who has had it and for how long all happen on their own. You hear that something is late from BuildCycle — not from a contractor asking why nobody replied.
The response is filed with the question, stamped and dated, against the drawing it modifies. No second act of filing, and nothing to reconstruct at closeout.
Watch ninety days of a job run in four seconds. Two things separate that a list would never show you: who raises the questions, and who sits on them. They are almost never the same party.
Who is asking the questions — and how that shifts as the job runs.
Median days from question to answer, tracked across the job.
The backlog of unanswered questions, week by week.
The loud one is rarely the expensive one. A contractor raising a lot of RFIs is usually doing you a favor — catching problems on paper, early, while they are still cheap. The costly one is the engineer quietly sitting on six of them for three weeks.
That silence bills you three ways. It costs time, because nothing downstream moves until the answer does. It costs money, because a sub who cannot proceed stands down and charges to come back. And it costs credibility — to the GC, and to the Owner watching the GC wait, a quiet design team looks like one that is not prioritizing the job. The Owner was your focus through design. Construction is where that is kept or spent.
The worst part of construction administration is not the work. It is carrying it — the inbox you cannot fully trust, the folder of attachments, the low hum of wondering what you have lost track of. That feeling is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when the record lives in email.
When the log is the record, nobody has to hold it in their head. That is the part your staff feel first, and the part that does not show up on any feature list.
You’ll land in a live CA project with real RFIs and real numbers already in it. Poke around; we’ll follow up once you’ve had a look, not spam you.