For years, site meetings ran notebook in hand, then tablet in hand. You took notes head down, on the page or on the screen, while the meeting moved on.

Today, more and more construction managers put their phone on the table and hit record. With the There mobile app, you record the whole meeting, or the whole site walk, and stay with the people instead of behind a screen. That’s our take: Be There.

This simple move raises a question nobody asked with a notebook: how do you tell attendees, and how do you write it in the meeting report? We answer that first. Then we follow the thread to the rest of the general conditions, and to the tools that keep them current.

Our running example is a fictional project, Les Terrasses du Vallon, a multifamily residential building in Valmoreau. Four short videos show each step in the product.

Record the meeting, and say so

A phone on the table

Recording a meeting is no longer reserved for conference rooms. Plaud made the pocket recorder popular, and you see more and more of them on jobsites. Its message, “Be present. Capture what matters.”, is close to ours: you record to be present, not to stare at a screen. Plaud even reminds users to tell attendees and get their consent before recording.

The difference is what happens next. A general-purpose recorder gives you a transcript and a summary; you still have to turn it into a meeting report. With There:

• No device to buy. Recording starts from the phone you already carry.

• No minute plan. Voice notes in the mobile app are free and unlimited.

• A note that knows the project. It feeds the meeting report directly, with its trades, tasks and general conditions.

Say it in the meeting report

Attendees need to know the meeting is recorded, and what the recording is for. That’s why There’s snippet library includes a dedicated notice, placed right under the Next meeting block, where invitees read it before they come. It says four things:

1. the meeting is recorded with There to help write the meeting report;

2. the recording is used for nothing else;

3. it is not used to train AI models;

4. any attendee can object before the discussion starts.

Three variants cover real cases: a recorded meeting, a recording an attendee declined, and a site walk the writer records on the move.

And out loud

Writing isn’t always enough: someone shows up without having read the last report. We recommend one sentence at the start of the meeting:

“Before we start, this meeting is being recorded with There to prepare the meeting report; the recording is used for nothing else. Does anyone object?”

If nobody objects, keep the “Meeting recorded with There” variant. If someone does, don’t record, and the report carries the “Recording declined” variant.

The meeting report, an extension of the contract

The recording notice is just one of the report’s general conditions. The others carry more weight than people think.

A construction manager we work with put it this way: the meeting report has become an extension of the contract, and the last umbrella when there’s a claim or a dispute. His general conditions are his leverage. For example: four business days to comment, or the report is approved without reservation by everyone. When a contractor or an inspection firm pushes back months later, the answer is already in writing.

He told us about a project where the inspection firm had turned fourteen suspended opinions into unfavorable ones. In the final report, a single unfavorable opinion can be enough for the insurance not to pay out. He wrote to the inspection firm’s regional management by registered letter, and everything was lifted within 48 hours. He could, because his meeting report showed, date by date, that every contractor had replied. That’s what one clause in the library is for: a suspended opinion is lifted before the work it concerns is built.

The clauses that keep the jobsite running

These clauses don’t get reinvented on every project. They get adjusted to the project: progress billing emailed on a private contract, uploaded to Chorus Pro, the French government’s e-invoicing platform, on a public one; four business days here, eight days there to comment. The trouble starts when you copy them from another project without adjusting them.

On a team, copy-paste gets expensive

The risk grows with the team. A project manager starts a new job and reuses a colleague’s general conditions. The comment deadline doesn’t match the contract, a clause is missing, the old project name is still there. Teams copy, so teams make the mistakes.

A snippet library organized like the report

In There, general conditions become snippets, stored in your firm’s Library. The “Meeting report · General conditions” folder holds 8 subfolders, numbered in report order: next meeting, project, report, meetings, documents, contractors, construction, finance. 24 snippets in all.

The folder is shared with everyone in the organization. When the technical director improves a clause, every project manager gets it in their next report. No more files emailed around. Snippet libraries are available starting with the Team plan.

One variant per real case

A snippet can have several variants. Take the “Subcontracting and approval” snippet. A subcontractor on site without approval or guaranteed payment exposes the owner: it’s the kind of point that comes up in the first dispute. The snippet has three variants:

• Approval procedure, the default: every subcontractor is declared and approved before working on site;

• Firm reminder, when an undeclared subcontractor has been spotted: the contractor regularizes right away;

• Approval and payment guarantee, for private contracts: the request comes 30 days before work starts, with a bank guarantee or a direct payment delegation.

Same logic for progress billing: the variant “By email, private contract” or “Platform upload” for a public contract, where contractors upload to Chorus Pro. Each variant comes with one sentence that says when to use it. What changes from one project to the next isn’t free text: the meeting day, time, place and deadlines are labels, picked from a list. Every report speaks with one voice.

Your standard in one click

The report template already includes these snippets. Create the report with Use template: snippets with several variants arrive outlined in orange. An icon in the margin opens Choose a variant. Read the descriptions, pick one, and the text follows.

One tip: choose the variant before editing the text. If you edit an outlined snippet first, There treats it as confirmed.

What about MRS?

Many French firms know MRS, Artecomm’s Word plugin. It helps write and standardize long documents in Word, from short notes to technical proposals, and it has proven itself, especially for specifications.

There starts from somewhere else: the meeting report, and AI built in from day one. Three differences:

• The text lives in the report, not in a file. Variants are picked in the shared report, online, by the whole team.

• You manage the library in conversation. Ask AI⋅there to create a snippet, add a variant or tidy a folder: it does it, with your approval.

• Even by voice. The mic in the AI⋅there chat lets you dictate the request instead of typing it, at your desk or on site.

Before you send, AI-assisted quality control

Even with a good library, you still need to check that the report is consistent. That the meeting schedule matches the invitation. That the approval deadline is the same everywhere. That no useful clause is missing. That’s the review AI Routines take on.

A routine is an AI⋅there instruction saved once and run in one click on the open report. The five “CR · Généralités” routines read the same reference document, a There document that describes the firm’s standard. Each runs one check:

Findings arrive as internal comments, anchored to the passage and ranked by severity: blocking, major, minor, to check. Like the library, routines can be created and edited by asking AI⋅there, typed or spoken. Custom routines are available on the Business plan.

9 a.m. here, 8 a.m. there

In the Terrasses du Vallon report, the Meeting organization block says “every Tuesday at 9 a.m.” The next meeting, though, is called for 8 a.m. Nobody had noticed. CR3 flagged it, quoted both passages and suggested the fix, without touching the text. In the same pass, it found a subcontractor approval deadline of three weeks in the general conditions, and fifteen days in the safety coordinator’s section.

The clause follows the jobsite

A task for the tiling trade reports an undeclared subcontractor. The Subcontracting snippet still carries the “Approval procedure” variant. CR2 flags it and asks for the “Firm reminder” variant. CR5 proposes the swap, waits for your approval, then inserts the library text word for word.

AI suggests, you decide. In Manual mode, every comment and every edit waits for your approval.

Written once, reused on every project, reviewed before you send

The notebook and the tablet gave way to the phone, and the meeting report became an extension of the contract. Its general conditions deserve better than copy-paste: a notice that announces the recording, a snippet library the whole team shares, and AI routines that review before you send. Your general conditions: written once, reused on every project, reviewed by AI before you send.

Ready to switch? Send us your current meeting report and we’ll send it back ready to go, general conditions included.