Investor-supervision offices and site managers handle correspondence that matters just as much as the technical documentation itself: notices to fix defects, positions on substituting materials, minutes of coordination meetings. In practice, these letters live separately from the documentation — in an inbox, sometimes in a paper register, rarely alongside the drawings and specifications they relate to.
Why correspondence needs its own place
A letter differs from a technical document in one specific way: it has a deadline and a person responsible for it. A notice telling a contractor to fix a defect in a slab only works if it’s clear who needs to respond and by when. If that information sits in an email thread, it’s easy to lose track of — especially with several tasks and letters running at once. A correspondence log attached to a specific task solves that: the letter, the responsible person and the deadline sit in one place, next to the documentation they concern.
Entries are added manually today
It’s worth stating this plainly rather than glossing over it: the correspondence log feature in DocuBIM is still in development, and entries — incoming and outgoing letters — are added manually today, the same way contracts are. There’s no automatic mail intake into the system yet, and no inbox integration. That’s a deliberate order of work: first the place where correspondence lives next to a task and its documentation, then the automation that removes the manual typing.
What this gives you already
Even with manual entry, correspondence attached to a task has an advantage over an email thread: it doesn’t get buried in one person’s inbox, it’s visible to the whole team working on that task, and it sits next to the documents, contracts and statuses it relates to. In the pilot example — an investor-supervision office running a task under a supervision contract — the correspondence log for one task shows, together: a notice to a contractor with a reply deadline, a position on the facade material already sent, and coordination-meeting minutes awaiting approval. Every entry carries a visible “added manually” marker — there’s no pretending the system picked something up from an inbox on its own.
What’s next
Automating mail intake — pulling messages straight into a contract or company on their own — is a plan today, not a shipped feature. Before that happens, we want to be sure the place for correspondence itself works the way the offices we’re piloting with actually need. We’re setting that order of features together with them, not deciding it in advance.