Took 11 days to find a field report bug hidden in our submittal logs

Honestly, I spent almost two weeks chasing a discrepancy that kept showing up in our monthly closeout package. Every time we ran the submittal summary, the dates were off by a day or two for about 15 items. I checked the import settings, the calendar timezone, even our server clock in the Phoenix office, and nothing matched. Finally I pulled the raw CSV export and saw that our field crew was entering dates in MM/DD/YY but the software was reading them as DD/MM/YY for about a third of the entries. It was a data entry habit, not a software bug, but the tool had no warning flag for that. I fixed it by adding a dropdown date picker on the mobile form and locked the column format on the desktop. Has anyone else had a similar hidden format mismatch sneak into their submittal or RFI logs? How did you catch it before closeout?

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sagey6923d ago

We had the same thing happen with RFI numbers last year, only it was the opposite problem. Our guys were typing zeros instead of the letter O on the project code, so about 20 RFIs got filed under the wrong job and we only caught it when the owner asked why their line item had extra work. I started running a quick sort on the log every Friday, just scanning for anything that looked off in the dates or codes, and it takes maybe ten minutes. That little habit has saved me three times since then, not bad for a boring weekly check.