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How a US luxury residential contractor took weekly client reports from a full Friday to under five minutes each

3 min read
Vikas Singhvi
Vikas Singhvi
Founder

A luxury residential contractor in the US sent each client a professional progress report every week. Its two project managers spent all of Friday drafting them for five active projects, and the drafts went to leadership by evening for review before reaching clients. With Velora drafting each report from what the site team had already sent on WhatsApp, reviewing a draft took a project manager under five minutes.

At a glance

  • Contractor: a luxury residential contractor in the US, with five active projects run by two project managers
  • Before: all of Friday drafting five weekly client reports, then leadership review by evening
  • After: under five minutes per report for a project manager to review the draft

The contractor​

Clients at the luxury end of the US residential market expect a progress report every week. This contractor sent one for every project: five at the time, run by two project managers. (For how this compares with the way Indian builders keep clients informed, see weekly report or WhatsApp group?)

The situation​

Every Friday, two project managers drafted a PDF report for each of the five projects between them. For each one, that meant:

  • gathering the week's site photos from WhatsApp
  • captioning them by hand
  • writing the report itself

Drafting took the whole day. By evening, the drafts went to the company's leadership for review, and only then out to clients.

Most of what the reports needed had already been sent during the week: the site team's updates and photos were sitting in WhatsApp. The work was turning them into five client-ready documents.

What changed​

Velora read the site team's WhatsApp updates and photos through the week and kept them as a site record. Each week, it drafted every project's report from that record:

  • an Executive Summary of the week
  • Key Accomplishments, each with its site photos attached and captioned
  • the Plan for Next Period

The project manager on each project reviewed the draft, removed a couple of photos or made minor edits, then finalised it.

The result​

Drafting the weekly reports went from all of Friday for two project managers to under five minutes per report. That's a project manager's own time to check and adjust each draft.

In their words​

"I used Velora to generate the weekly report for my project, and overall, the summary and key accomplishments are pretty accurate. It's actually what I used lol. The generated report is a good starting point, and I can always make minor edits to the photos included and captions."

— Project Manager, luxury residential contractor, US

How the Weekly Progress Report works​

Velora's Weekly Progress Report is drafted from the updates and photos your site teams send on WhatsApp. The Executive Summary and the Plan for Next Period are always included, and Key Accomplishments carry the site photos attached to each update. Every section is editable: you can drop photos that shouldn't go to the client, edit captions, and add back site photos that were never tagged to an update. Finalising it produces Word and PDF files. It can also be drafted automatically every week, on the day and time you set. See Field Intelligence for the rest.