A ready to use Excel dashboard for the weekly project meeting: programme status, cost, open RFIs, variations, delay days and safety on one page. Built by quantity surveyors.
A construction project dashboard is the single page summary of a project's programme, cost and risk status, built from weekly metrics so the project team can see planned versus actual progress, cost to complete, open RFIs and variations, delay days, safety observations and overdue actions without opening five other spreadsheets.
Most contractors build one every week for the client, the board, or both. The problem is rarely the layout. It is that every number on it has to be typed in by hand from somewhere else.Most project dashboards fail for the same reason: whoever builds it on Friday afternoon is re-keying numbers that already exist somewhere else, so the dashboard is only as current, and as accurate, as the last person who copied them across. This template will not fix that on its own. What it does is give you a clean weekly input row and a dashboard that recalculates itself the moment that row is filled in, so at least the re-keying only happens once.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Planned % and Actual % | The two numbers every progress conversation starts from |
| BAC, Actual cost, Earned value | Enough to see cost and schedule performance at a glance, without a full EVM workbook |
| Open RFIs and open variations | Flags design and commercial risk building up before it shows in the cost line |
| Delay days | Tracks cumulative delay week on week, not just this week's excuse |
| Safety observations | Keeps safety on the same page as commercial status, where it belongs |
| Overdue actions | Pulls straight from the Issues & Actions tab so nothing gets dropped between meetings |
[SCREENSHOT: Project Data tab showing the weekly input row alongside the Dashboard tab's KPI cards and the Issues & Actions tab feeding overdue count] The Project Data tab is the only place anyone types anything. The Dashboard tab reads it and shows latest planned, latest actual, progress variance, open RFIs and overdue actions as four cards. The How to use tab explains the whole flow with a worked example.
The Excel file with a weekly project data tab, an automatic dashboard, and an Issues & Actions tracker.
Download the template (.xlsx) Free download. No email needed. Yours to use and share with your team.Over three weekly entries the project data tab shows a £3.5m job holding to plan: 12%, 24% and then 36% actual against the same planned figures, earned value tracking cost almost exactly. Open RFIs fall from 8 to 6 as the design team clears the backlog, one variation opens in week two and stays open, and delay days spike to 2 in week two before clearing. None of that took a formula to explain. It took someone reading three rows of a table, which is the whole point of a dashboard: turn data into a five second read for the person running the meeting.
Now picture the same project on a bad week: the person who normally updates the sheet is on leave, so Friday's dashboard either goes out with last week's numbers relabelled, or it does not go out at all. Either way, the meeting runs on stale information and nobody in the room knows it.
A dashboard is a summary. It cannot be more accurate than the records it summarises, and on most projects those records live in diaries, allocations, instructions and correspondence that nobody has rolled up into a weekly figure yet. The dashboard is downstream of that work, not a replacement for it.
Gather's AI QS turns the daily record into a contract aligned commercial position automatically, so the claim writes itself from evidence instead of memory.
See the AI QS in action A 30 minute call. No commitment. See if it fits how your team already works.FAQ
At minimum: planned versus actual progress, budget at completion, actual cost and earned value, open RFIs and variations, cumulative delay days, safety observations and overdue actions. This template covers all of them on one weekly input row.
Weekly, in line with the project team meeting it usually feeds. A dashboard updated less often stops reflecting what is actually happening on site within a couple of weeks.
It works well for one person keeping one project current. What it cannot do is populate itself from the diaries, allocations and correspondence that actually generate the numbers, which is where the manual re-keying, and the risk of a stale dashboard, comes from.
Yes. The Dashboard tab is built to be screenshotted or shared as-is for a client update, while the Project Data and Issues & Actions tabs stay as the internal working detail behind it.
Gather reads your site records as they come in and keeps programme, cost and risk status current automatically.
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