About Dayfile
Dayfile is a small UK company run by people who have spent their working lives in construction and construction software. We would rather you knew us than took our word for it.
Where we come from
We built Dayfile because we had been the person being asked “did we ever agree to that?” — and had spent the afternoon finding out.
Our founder is a chartered quantity surveyor who started as an assistant QS in 2000 and spent a decade on the commercial side of live jobs before moving into construction software. The rest of the team have spent decades selling, supporting and building software for UK contractors, consultants and estimators — long enough to know what gets adopted and what gets ignored.
We started out reading commercial email for subcontractors and flagging the risks in it. Working with our first customers taught us something simpler and bigger: the problem isn’t reading the email — it’s that nobody keeps the file any more. So that is what Dayfile does. It keeps the file.
We are a small, self-funded business. That matters to you in one way: we answer to our customers, not to a fund. If something doesn’t work, you will hear it from us first.
The team
You will deal with the people below — not a ticket queue. Every one of us has spent most of our career in the industry you work in.
Founder
Chartered quantity surveyor. Started on site as an assistant QS in 2000 and spent ten years in commercial roles at SP Projects, Davis Langdon (later AECOM) and COWI before moving into construction technology.
Co-founded LetsBuild and ran it as CEO; founded BidWork, the AI tendering platform acquired by Once For All in 2024; co-founded SiteHub. Advises Once For All on innovation and M&A. Lives in Denmark, works with the team in the UK every day.
LinkedIn →
Managing director
Forty years building and running construction software businesses in the UK. Managing director of FCG from 1984, then Pinstripe Software; operations director at Causeway Technologies through the years it became the leading software house for UK construction.
Later managing director of Integrity Software in South Africa and client relationship director at COINS. Bob has seen boom and bust from the inside, and has spent his career making sure customers actually get value from what they bought.
Chief technology officer
The engineer who built Dayfile. Twenty-plus years of .NET, Azure and SQL Server development, with a long track record of building and running business systems that have to be reliable and secure.
Rob is responsible for how your data is handled — the read-only connection, the filtering, the access controls and the UK hosting. If you have a technical question, he is the person who answers it.
Operations director
An experienced operator who runs the company day to day: onboarding, setup, support, security certification and the Microsoft partnership. Ioan is the person who gets you connected and makes sure it stays that way.
Business development director
Ten years helping construction firms choose and adopt software: CostX and Exactal, NBS, Barbour ABI, and most recently as chief commercial officer at BidWork. Alex runs your first conversation with us, and he will tell you plainly if Dayfile isn’t the right fit.
No forms, no queue
Send us a message and a person replies. Thirty minutes on a call and we will show you Dayfile working on real correspondence — and answer whatever you want to ask about how it handles your data.
Book a demoHow we work
Dayfile can read your correspondence. It cannot send, move or delete anything, and it never will. You can revoke access from your own Microsoft admin centre at any time.
Personal, HR and non-project conversations stay out of Dayfile. Commercially sensitive correspondence is restricted, so it isn’t automatically shared with the wider team, and you decide who sees which folders.
When Dayfile can’t find something, it tells you “nothing found”. It never fills a gap. Every answer shows its source — sender, date, word for word — so you can check it.
UK hosted, encrypted, logically isolated per customer. Nothing is used to train anyone’s AI. You get a full export whenever you want it, including when you leave.
One plan, priced by team size, with everything Dayfile makes from your correspondence included. You get a number on the first call, in writing, and it doesn’t change mid-contract.
Dayfile works from what it can see in the mailboxes and groups you connect. Attachments that only exist on a server, or a decision that never got written down anywhere, aren’t in it — and we will say so before you buy.
A letter from the founder
Back in the day before email, every office kept a day file.
One folder. A copy of everything that went out, filed on the day it went out.
On a construction job, that mattered to everyone — architect, consultant, contractor and subcontractor. Everyone needed their own record of what had been said, sent and agreed.
Any argument about who said what, you pulled the file and read it back. People used to say, “It’s in the day file.” That was enough. It meant the answer existed, the record was there, and nobody had to rely on memory.
Nobody called it a system. It was a habit — the last thing done before the post went. But it meant the record never lived in anyone’s head.
Sir Terry Farrell’s practice archive is now held by Newcastle University: decades of drawings, correspondence and project material — from Charing Cross and the MI6 Building to Hong Kong. Sadly, he died in 2025. But the record remains. You can still trace what was discussed, what was decided, and when.
It was not just architects. Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons kept the contractor’s side of the record too: correspondence, contract registers and papers going back to 1882. Different roles on the same job. Same need to know what was agreed.
The people go. The file stays.
Then the post stopped. Email came. And for thirty years, no one kept a day file.
There is now more correspondence than ever — email, Teams, WhatsApp. But nobody keeps a day file anymore.
Dayfile gives every project its day file again — automatically.
One trusted place for what was agreed, when it was agreed, and the evidence behind it.
So when someone asks, “Did we ever agree to that?”
You do not search inboxes, chase former colleagues, or argue about memory.
You say: “It’s in the Dayfile.”
Company details
Registered in England and Wales, company number 17122272. VAT registration number 517005231. Registered office: The Old Coach House Mynydd Ednyfed, Caernarfon Road, Criccieth, Gwynedd, Wales, LL52 0PH.
Cyber Essentials certified. Microsoft verified partner. GDPR compliant data handling with a written retention and deletion policy. Security page →
sales@getdayfile.com for anything commercial. privacy@getdayfile.com for anything about your data. A person replies to both.
Dayfile can’t send, edit or delete anything in Microsoft 365, and you can disconnect it at any time. Personal, HR and irrelevant conversations stay out, while sensitive information is only visible to the people who should see it. Your data is securely stored in the UK and is never used to train AI models.
Cyber Essentials
UK GDPR
UK hosted
MicrosoftTalk to a person
We will show you Dayfile working and tell you plainly what it does and doesn’t do.
Book a 30-minute demoOr start a 30-day free trial — unlimited users, nothing to install, disconnect any time.