Discovery Odoo Handbook

One habit decides whether the weekly schedule and the monthly report come out right. Everything else in this handbook is procedure; this is the rule.

The schedule pulls tasks by asking a single question of each one: does this task's planned window overlap the week being planned? A task with no start, or no deadline, has no window, so it cannot overlap anything. It is skipped silently.

Two groups of people work in two different places. Site engineers work entirely in the portal — the web address they log into on a phone, with no Odoo backend access. Project managers work in the backend, the full Odoo interface.

Everything a site engineer needs happens on one phone, in the portal. Four routines: check in, report the day, request overtime, check out.

Before your first day

Your first check-in permanently binds your account to the phone and network you used. Use the phone you will carry every day. If you later change phone or SIM, tell the office before you try to check in — an administrator has to release the old device, and until then check-in will refuse.

A. Check in

1. Open the portal on your phone and sign in. The home page shows two large buttons, Check In and Check Out.

2. Allow location access when the browser asks. Keep it allowed permanently — the check-in cannot be recorded without it.

3. Press Check In. Stand still for a moment: the app waits for an accurate satellite fix and rejects an old or vague one rather than recording a wrong position.

4. If you are inside your assigned site boundary, the check-in is recorded and the button state changes. If you are outside it, you are told so — move onto site and try again.

B. The daily site report

One report per project per day, filed before you leave site. It is the only record of what the site actually did that day, and it is what the office prints for the client at the end of the week.

1. In the portal, open My Projects, choose your project, then the Monitoring tab.

2. Under New Daily Site Report, set the Report Date. It defaults to today — change it only if you are filing for a missed day.

3. Enter the Manpower Count: total people on site that day, in-house and sub-contract together.

4. Write Today's Activities. This is the line the client reads. Name the location and the trade, not just the verb — "second floor east block, blockwork to gridline 4" carries information; "work continued" does not.

5. Tick Site Safety Measures Followed and Housekeeping Done if they were. If either was not, leave it unticked and write the reason in the notes box — an untidy answer with a reason is worth more than a tick that isn't true.

6. Under Equipments, enter the count for each machine listed. Leave a machine at zero if it was not on site. If a machine you used is not in the list, ask the project manager to add it to the project — engineers cannot add equipment themselves.

7. Submit. The report appears in Report History below the form, and reaches the office immediately.

C. Overtime for site labour

Overtime is submitted as a batch for several workers at once, by the engineer who supervised it — not by the workers.

1. On the portal home page press Overtime Request.

2. Choose the type. Regular covers extended site work. Catering covers catering duty and asks for different fields.

3. Select every employee the request covers — the list takes multiple selections in one request.

4. For regular overtime, set Date From, Date To and Requested Hours. For catering, set the catering start time and catering hours instead.

5. Write a real reason. The approver sees this line and nothing else about the shift — replace the default text.

6. Submit. Track the outcome under My Overtime; the approver is notified automatically.

D. Check out

Press Check Out before leaving site; the position is captured again. Review your own history under My Attendance, where you can filter by date range.

Also on your portal

Two extra pages are available to engineers: pending deliveries — confirmed purchase orders for your project with quantities still outstanding, so you can chase what has not arrived — and team locations, where you assign which site your team members are attached to for attendance.

Nothing else in this handbook works until these are done. Complete them once per project, before the first week is planned.

Per project, once

• Project start and end dates setThe schedule warns when a planned week falls outside them.
• Every task has a planned start and a deadlineThe single condition for a task to appear on a weekly schedule.
• Site engineers added as project members with portal accessWithout membership, the project does not appear on their portal.
• Equipment list configured on the projectThe daily site report only offers machines listed here; engineers cannot add them.
• Labour skills configuredUnder Project ▸ Configuration ▸ Skills — the trades you plan headcount against.
• Attendance location and boundary set for the siteCheck-in is refused outside it, so a wrong boundary stops the whole site punching in.
• Employees assigned to their site locationEngineers can do this themselves from the team locations page.
• Approvers named for attendance and for overtimeTwo separate rights — assign both, or requests sit unactioned.
• Purchase orders tagged to the projectOtherwise pending deliveries never reach the engineer's portal page.

Kept current, weekly

• Completion % on every live taskDrives the overall progress figure on the timeline report.
• Stage moved as work progressesThe monthly report separates completed from in-progress work by stage and actual dates.
• Actual start and end dates filled as work really happensPlanned dates are not a substitute — the monthly report reads the actual ones.
• Date extensions logged with a reasonExtending a deadline records the previous date, the extra days and why. That log is the defence when a delay is questioned.
• Attendance and overtime approvedUnapproved overtime is not payable, however genuine.

One schedule per project per week. The system will not let you create a second one for the same week — if you cannot create it, it already exists.

Find it at Project ▸ Labour Scheduling ▸ Weekly Schedules. The menu is visible only to users in the Labour Schedule Manager group; managers see every project, other members see only projects they belong to.

1. Create and pick the week. Choose the Project, then set Pick Any Date In Week to any date inside the week you want. The week start snaps back to Saturday and the end to Friday automatically.

2. Decide on Friday. Leave Friday Working Day unticked for a normal week and the schedule runs Saturday to Thursday, with the Friday tab hidden. Tick it and Friday joins the week and the printed sheet.

3. Let the tasks load. Setting project and week pulls in every task whose planned window touches that week. Add tasks in the Gantt after that, then press Fetch Active Tasks to pull the new ones in without disturbing what you have already filled.

4. Read the warning banner. Tasks with missing dates, a week falling outside the project's own dates, and tasks running past their original end date are all listed here. Fix the dates on the task, then fetch again.

5. Fill each day. Open the tab for a day — Saturday through Thursday. Only the tasks actually live on that day appear. Press More Info on a task line and add a row per trade: Skill, In House headcount, Sub Contract headcount. The total is calculated.

6. Check the week's totals. On the Labour Lines tab, More Info against any line opens the weekly summary for that task, adding up what you have planned across all days.

7. Confirm. Press Confirm when the week is agreed. Draft is the only state where schedule lines can be deleted — that is deliberate, so a confirmed week cannot quietly lose a task.

8. Print and issue. Print produces the Weekly Labour Schedule PDF: one column per working day, in-house and sub-contract split out, with column totals. Issue it to the site before the week starts.

9. Run and close the week. Move it to In Progress when the week begins, and Mark as Done when it ends. Reset to Draft is available if the week has to be reopened.

Starting next week from this one

Duplicate to Next Week creates the following week in draft and carries across every task still live in that week, then adds any task newly starting. It does not copy headcounts — the labour is yours to plan each week, which is the point. Move between weeks with ← Previous Week and Next Week →.

Every report Discovery issues, where it lives, and what it needs to be correct.

The schedule holds what Discovery planned. The daily site reports hold what site actually had. Nothing compares them automatically — that comparison is a person's job, once a week.

This is the control that makes the whole system worth running. Without it, the schedule becomes a document nobody checks against reality.

1. On Thursday, print the Weekly Labour Schedule for the week now closing. Note the daily total headcount from the column totals.

2. Run the Weekly Site Report for the same project, with date from and date to matching that week exactly.

3. Set the two side by side. For each day, compare the planned total against the manpower count the engineer reported.

4. Write the variance and its reason into the project log — short is fine: "Tuesday planned 24, actual 18: sub-contract steel fixers did not mobilise."

5. Carry the reason into next week's plan before you confirm it. A variance that repeats three weeks running is a planning assumption that is wrong, not a site problem.

The week runs Saturday to Thursday. Wednesday and Thursday are the anchors: the week ahead is built on Wednesday and issued on Thursday, so site starts Saturday with the sheet already in hand. Your own role's items are shown at full strength; the other role's are dimmed, so you can still see where the handover happens.

Monthly, in the first working days: run the Monthly Progress Report for the month just ended, and the Approval Tracker report for anything still pending.