Who’s on my site right now?

If you run one site, you can stand at the gate. If you run three, you can’t. And the moment you can’t physically be there, the most basic question in your business — who is actually working right now? — stops being something you know and becomes something you’re told. You call the supervisor. He says the crew is full. You write down a number you have no way to check, and you build your whole day, and your whole payroll, on top of it.

Trust is fine. Trust without proof is expensive.

This isn’t about assuming your supervisors are dishonest. Most aren’t. It’s that “we’re at full crew today” and “we’re at full crew today — here are the 96 names and their check-in times” are two completely different sentences. The first is a feeling. The second is a fact. Running a construction business on feelings works right up until the month the numbers don’t add up, and by then the money is already spent.

The cost of not knowing is rarely a single dramatic loss. It’s the slow bleed of a site that ran half-empty on a rainy Tuesday while you paid for a full crew, a phase that fell behind because fewer people showed up than you were told, a subcontractor whose headcount never quite matched his invoice. None of it shows up in a phone call. All of it shows up on payday.

Live, from anywhere

Twese turns that guess into a live view. Because every worker scans in and out at the gate, the system always knows who is on site right now — per project, in real time. From your phone in Kigali, Kampala, or halfway across the world, you can open Twese and see the count, broken down by role: how many masons, how many casual labourers, who has checked in and who hasn’t. No call required. No waiting for someone to “count and get back to you.”

For a company running multiple projects, that changes the whole rhythm of management. You’re no longer flying blind between site visits. You can compare projects at a glance, notice that one site is chronically under-crewed before it derails the schedule, and ask the right question on the right day — not at month-end, when the only thing left to do is pay the bill.

This matters most where sites are spread out

Rwanda’s construction boom means growth isn’t confined to one neighbourhood of Kigali — it’s roads, housing, and commercial projects spread across the country, often run by companies whose head office is nowhere near the site. The further your projects are from your desk, the more you’ve had to rely on someone else’s word. Live attendance closes that distance. The site can be three hours away and you still know, to the person, who is on it.

What actually changes

You start managing by facts instead of by feeling. You catch a half-empty site the same morning it happens, while you can still do something about it. And your supervisors get something too: when the record is automatic and visible, the honest ones are finally believed without having to argue for it. Everyone reads the same live truth — so there’s far less to dispute in the first place.