Turn site comments into a shareable defect report

How to turn site comments into a shareable defect report — from your phone

Most defect reports are born twice. Once on site, where you actually see the problem, and again at a desk hours later, where you try to type up what you saw into something you can send. The second birth is where the time goes — and where details die.

This is a walkthrough of doing it once: capturing each issue on the plan as it happens, and ending the day with a defect report — a snag list, a punch list, whatever your trade calls it — that’s ready to share without a rebuild.

Start from the plan, not a blank document

A report built from a blank page asks you to remember everything. A report built from the plan asks you to remember nothing — the plan holds the locations for you.

In PinMy you upload the floor plan or drawing once. From then on, every issue lives as a pin on that plan, exactly where it is in the real building. The document you’ll send later is just a view of those pins.

Capture each defect as a pin for your punch list

Standing at the problem, you tap the plan at that point. A small menu opens with three ways to record it:

• Voice — say the defect out loud (up to 30 seconds Free, three minutes Premium); PinMy auto-transcribes it in 20+ languages.
• Text — type a short note when it’s quicker.
• Area — drag a rectangle to mark a whole zone instead of a single point.

Add a photo and the pin now carries the location, the description, and the evidence in one place. That’s a complete defect entry, made in about ten seconds, without a form.

Assign each issue to an owner

A defect report that nobody owns is just a complaint list. So on each pin you @mention the responsible person — subcontractor, foreman, trade lead — and assign the issue to them. Now every entry has a name attached, and the people who need to act can see exactly what’s theirs.

Watch the snag list build itself on the board

As you assign, each issue drops onto a Kanban board with three columns: To-do, In Progress, Done. You don’t maintain this board manually — it’s the live state of your pins.

That board is your snag list. Instead of a spreadsheet you update by hand, you get a punch list that reflects reality because it’s made of the same pins you placed on site.

The difference shows up most at the end of a job. A hand-maintained snag spreadsheet is only ever as current as the last time someone remembered to update it — which on a busy site is rarely. A board built from pins is current by default: it shows what’s open because the pins say what’s open. You’re not reconciling two records, you’re reading one.

Track progress so your construction inspection report stays current

As work happens, owners move their items across the board and mark fixed issues resolved. A resolved pin dims on the plan, so at a glance you can see what’s still open and what’s closed. The status in your construction inspection report isn’t something you reconcile later — it’s already true. If you want to see this rhythm across a full shift, here’s a day in the life of a site supervisor using the same pins.

Export the report when you need to send it

When it’s time to hand something over — to the client, the developer, the main contractor — you generate the PDF report. It pulls together the pins: a preview of the plan, photo, video, map or 3D IFC model with numbered markers on it, each pin’s description, and a task table with assignee, status and dates. Every page carries a QR code and clickable links back into PinMy. The thing you would have spent the evening typing is assembled from what you already captured.

There are two ways to get one. The Item Report comes straight from the file itself — every pin and every comment on it, assigned or not, with no task setup at all. The task-driven reports come from the file or the To-Do board and are built around assignments: Status (all issues, open only, or done only), Assignment (one person’s tasks), and Daily activity (what was created or changed today).

If you only want a record of what you found, the Item Report is the shorter road — you never have to open the board.

Be straight with the people you send it to: the report is currently in beta (β), genuinely useful today but still maturing. A few honest limits worth knowing before you send one to a client: a voice comment appears as a link to listen in the app rather than a transcript, reply comments aren’t included yet, the header counters count tasks rather than pins, and a map-based report needs an internet connection to render its tiles. The point isn’t a perfect template — it’s that the content of the report already exists, captured on site, instead of being typed up from a tired memory at the end of the day.

That’s the real saving. Most of the effort in a defect report was never the formatting; it was the remembering. Build the report from pins and the remembering is already done.

Keep one source of truth as issues close

Because the report comes from the pins, you don’t end up with five conflicting versions in an inbox. The plan stays the live record. When the last item is resolved and the board is clear, the report you export reflects a site that’s genuinely closed out — not a status you hoped was right.

A small habit that compounds

The shift is from documenting after to documenting during. Once a defect is a pin the moment you see it, the report stops being a task. Most teams who try it on one handover stop going back to the WhatsApp-and-spreadsheet method — the one where a WhatsApp voice message gets lost the moment the next forty arrive — because the time saved is obvious the first time.

Recognise the late-night-typing problem? Send this to the colleague who still rebuilds the snag list from memory.

What PinMy is NOT

PinMy isn’t a full quality-management or contract-administration platform, and it won’t replace your project controls. With 3D models, a pin marks a point in space — a dated snapshot — not an element in the model, and it doesn’t read element data. The web PDF report is useful but still evolving, so don’t promise a client a feature that isn’t there yet. What PinMy does reliably is turn what you see on site into located, owned, trackable issues you can share.

FAQ

What’s the difference between a defect report, a snag list and a punch list? They’re mostly the same thing under different names: a list of issues found on site that need fixing before sign-off. “Snag list” is common in the UK and Ireland, “punch list” in North America, and “defect report” is the more formal handover term — PinMy builds all three from the same pins.

Can I make a defect report from my phone? Yes. You capture each defect on site from your phone — pin, photo, voice or text — and generate the shareable PDF report on the web. The capture is the work; the report assembles from it.

Is the exported PDF report a finished product? The web PDF report is genuinely useful today but still maturing. It improves release by release, so treat it as an evolving feature and set honest expectations with whoever you send it to.

Build your next defect report on site, not at 9pm

Try capturing one walkthrough as pins and exporting the report — see how much of the desk work disappears.

• See how it works: pinmy.co
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