FAQs for Records

Question 1

What records should a subcontractor keep?

Accepted Answer

Six habits: a daily diary, labour allocation, dated photographs, every instruction in writing, the payment paper trail, and delivery records. Kept daily, they cost minutes. Keep six things as routine, because you cannot know in month two which of them month eleven will need. A daily site diary recording who was where, what was worked on, and anything abnormal: access denied, areas not ready, waiting on information. Labour allocation, even rough, putting operatives against activities and areas, because disruption claims live or die on it. Photographs with dates and locations: progress, conditions found, work about to be covered up. Instructions and changes in writing, chasing written confirmation of anything verbal within days rather than weeks. The payment trail: applications, notices received and sent, and what actually arrived. And the goods side, delivery tickets and off hire notes, which settle more dayworks and materials arguments than anyone expects. The test for each is not whether it proves a claim today, it is whether it was made at the time: contemporaneous records, the ones made while the events ran, carry a weight at assessment that no reconstruction ever recovers. Kept daily these cost minutes on a phone; reconstructed a year later they cost a consultant's invoice and half their credibility.

Question 2

Which records actually decide claims?

Accepted Answer

The ones made at the time by the people who were there: the instruction trail, the notices, and the diaries, registers and photos behind them. The records that decide claims are the ones made at the time, by the people who were there, to run the job. They form a hierarchy. At the top, the contractual paperwork: instructions, confirmations of verbal instructions, notices and their correspondence, because entitlement usually turns on whether these exist and when they were sent. Beneath, the records of fact: site diaries, allocation and day sheets, delivery tickets, programme updates and photographs, proving what happened, who was where, and what it cost. Then the corroborating sources nobody thinks of as claim records, weather data, crane and hoist logs, gate records, payroll, valuable because they were kept by systems with no stake in the argument. What unites them is timing: a record made before anyone knew there would be a dispute carries weight no reconstruction can match. So keep the paperwork the contract names and the daily records that prove the facts, as the job runs, not afterwards.

Question 3

What should a site diary actually say?

Accepted Answer

Who was where, doing what, what stopped them and for how long, in names and numbers rather than conclusions like delayed by others. A site diary should record facts a stranger could act on years later: who was on site, where each gang worked, what they achieved, what stopped or slowed them, who or what caused it, and how long it lasted, alongside the baseline of weather, labour and plant. The entry that fails is the conclusion: delayed by others, no access, waiting on information. It records frustration, not the event, and proves nothing, because it names no area, cause or duration. The entry that succeeds is specific: which trade, which block, which level, what was missing or blocked, which company caused it, and the hours or days lost. Two habits multiply a diary's value. Write it the same day, because entries batch-filled at the week's end read exactly like what they are. And keep writing on the ordinary days, because an unbroken run of unremarkable entries is what makes the remarkable ones credible: without the baseline of a normal week, you cannot show what the disrupted week cost.

Question 4

Do photos and WhatsApp messages count as evidence?

Accepted Answer

Yes, if they can be dated, placed and produced, but they support a claim rather than make one, and they must be exported before phones are wiped. Yes. Adjudicators and tribunals see phone photos and messaging threads in almost every dispute now, but three limits decide their worth. First, they must be capable of being dated and placed: a wide shot carrying the phone's date and location data proves the state of a named block on a named morning, where a close-up proves only that there was water somewhere once. Second, they must still exist when needed: photos live on personal phones that get replaced, and group chats vanish when someone leaves, so anything that matters must be exported into the project file while it can be. Third, they cut both ways: a thread showing the other side directing extra work also shows what your side said, promised and knew, and disclosure will not let you keep only the helpful half. Used well, a message captures an instruction nobody wrote up, in the instructing party's own words, and a photo routine on fixed positions builds a visual diary. But they are corroboration, not a system: they work best proving the entry the diary already made, not standing in for the diary never kept.

Question 5

Who on site should own the records?

Accepted Answer

Named individuals, one per record, each closest to the facts that record captures, with someone senior checking monthly that it is happening. Each record should belong to one named person, whoever stands closest to the facts it captures. The site diary belongs to the site manager or foreman who watches the job happen, because a diary only counts if the person who was there writes it. The registers, of variations, of drawings and revisions, of notices given and received, belong to whoever runs the commercial side, usually the QS, because registers are read against the contract. The photo routine belongs to whoever already walks the job on a rhythm. What fails is shared ownership: a record everyone keeps is a record nobody keeps, and the gap surfaces at the account, each person having assumed another wrote things down. Above the owners sits the second half: a senior monthly check that the records are being kept, because ownership without inspection decays quietly, and by the time a claim exposes it the missing months cannot be rebuilt. Give the check a fixed date and an hour: sample the diary against what the checker knows happened, test the registers against the month's drawings and correspondence, and ask the question that catches most losses early: did anything happen this month that should have triggered a notice nobody sent?

Question 6

We kept almost no records. Is the claim dead?

Accepted Answer

Not necessarily, but it is smaller and harder: some evidence can be rebuilt honestly from other sources, some entitlement is gone, and speed decides which. Not necessarily dead, but smaller, harder and shrinking by the month. Start with what can be rebuilt honestly. Projects shed records into systems nobody thinks of as claim evidence: emails and attachments carry dates and admissions, delivery tickets and invoices prove materials arriving against a timeline, payroll and allocation data prove who was on site and for how long, drawing registers and revision dates prove when information arrived, phone photos carry their own dates, and third parties, weather services, plant hire firms, crane and gate logs, kept records with no stake in your argument. A claim reassembled from these, openly presented as a reconstruction anchored to documents that existed at the time, can still be good, and statements from the people who were there help most when taken early, dated honestly rather than dressed up as site records. Now the harder half: whatever the contract made conditional on notices is a separate question from proof. A time-barred notification stays time-barred however well you later evidence the event, which is why the answer to a thin file is never to wait. Rescue what exists, take the statements now, and put the record routine right today, because the claim you can still prove is the one you stop losing evidence for this morning.

FAQs for Records, Claims & Disputes

Frequently asked questions

Keeping the records