An inspector walks the second floor with a rolled up drawing under one arm. He spots a hairline crack near the stair core, marks a rough cross on the paper, and moves on. Two weeks later the note reads "crack near stairwell" and nobody can find the spot again. The drawing knew where the wall was. It never knew where the crack was.
That gap is the whole subject of this post. Most snagging tools stop at a photo and a comment. A finding should be a place anyone can walk back to, on screen or on site.
The note that loses its place
Think about where a snag lives on most sites today. A cross on a printed plan. A photo in the camera roll with no idea which room it was. A line in a spreadsheet that reads "window frame, second floor, not watertight" with no way to tell which of forty frames it meant. Each of those records the problem. None of them records the place.
So the same defect gets found twice. Once on the walk, when it is obvious and standing in front of you. Again two weeks later, when someone has to reconstruct where "near the stairwell" actually was, usually by walking the floor a second time. That second walk is pure waste, and on the filing deadline, with the bevoegd gezag waiting, it is the walk you do not have time for.
The model, on the phone in your hand
Here is the change. The building already lives on a model: every wall, floor, duct and window frame built as an object that knows what it is and where it sits. That model does not have to stay on a workstation. It fits on the phone in your pocket.
Open a project on site and the model opens with it, in 3D. Isolate the storey you are standing on so the floors above stop getting in the way. Switch to a flat 2D plan when you want to read it like a drawing, or a split view with the plan on one side and the model on the other. It is the same building either way, so you are never choosing between the drawing and the model. You have both, in one hand.
Pinned to the element, not to a page
When you find something, you place a pin on the element it concerns. That door. That beam. That window frame. The finding is now anchored to the object itself, carried by the element's own identity in the model, so it holds even when the drawing revision changes underneath it.
Onto that pin goes a photo from the phone, a severity, and the person who owns the fix. Mark up the photo if a red arrow makes it clearer. A finding is never a vague description again. It is a precise point anyone can return to, weeks later, without walking the floor to guess where it was. Send it to whoever fixes it, and check it off with a photo when it is done.
Why this pays off under the Wkb
Since the Wet kwaliteitsborging voor het bouwen took effect on 1 January 2024, you have to prove your work at gereedmelding, not just do it. Proof is far easier when every finding already sits on the model with a photo and a resolution, instead of in a folder of loose site pictures nobody can place.
Where site signal runs out
Honesty first, because a dossier is legally load bearing and an overclaim is a liability. Coverage on a real site is patchy, a stairwell or a basement can drop you to nothing, and full offline first sync is not shipped yet. It is the next step we are building, so the notes you take with no signal hold locally and sync on their own once the bars come back. Today the model and its findings are on the phone, and the finding you place lands in the same dossier track as the rest of your evidence. We would rather tell you where the edge is than pretend it is not there.
Why an open model travels
None of this rests on one company's file format. The model on your phone is IFC, the vendor neutral openBIM standard kept by buildingSMART and published as ISO 16739. A model drawn in one tool opens cleanly in another, which is why you are not locked into a single vendor for the ten years a building has to stay accountable.
That also means the workflow is not a Dutch curiosity. IFC reads the same on a site in Rotterdam, Antwerp or Luxembourg, so the model in your pocket is the same idea anywhere in Europe that builds on open standards. BimDossier is built for the Netherlands and its Wkb today, and it is built on formats that already cross the border.
A finding should outlive the walk that found it.
Where we come in
That is what BimDossier does on site. The model in your pocket, findings pinned to the exact element, photos and severity and an owner, all flowing into the Wkb dossier from bouwmelding to gereedmelding. Everything sits on the model, so the place a problem was found is never lost again.