Rebuilding the story months later
Your job was held up by late design information for the services, then by a client change to the layout of the upper floors. Your team believes it is entitled to recover some of the cost of the prolonged time on site. The commercial manager starts preparing a submission and needs to show what resources were on site, what they were doing, what was affected and when.
The site diary has entries, but they are short and inconsistent. Labour returns are in a folder. Plant hire invoices are in accounts. Correspondence about the delays is spread across three inboxes. Photos are on the site manager's phone, and he has moved to another job. Putting the story together takes weeks, and some of it cannot be proved.
Why the records do not hold up
- Site diaries are written at the end of a long day and miss what later matters.
- Nothing links a day's records to the events that might be claimed.
- Labour, plant and preliminaries costs sit in different systems.
- Photos are not dated and located in a way that helps.
- Notices and correspondence are filed by person, not by event.
Everyone on site knows what happened. The problem is that knowing is not the same as having it written down, organised and dated.
The cost of weak records
We will not advise you on entitlement or how to present a claim, which is for your commercial team and advisers. In practical terms, records that are thin or hard to find make any submission slower to prepare, harder to support and easier to challenge. Commercial staff spend weeks reconstructing, and the outcome can depend on what you happened to keep.
| Record | Where it is now | What capture adds |
|---|---|---|
| Daily resources | Handwritten diary | Labour and plant logged by area and activity |
| Delays and disruption | Diary note, if any | Recorded against a flagged event |
| Photos | Personal phone | Dated, located, linked to area and event |
| Correspondence | Individual inboxes | Filed against the event it concerns |
| Costs | Accounts and timesheets | Linked by date and cost code for the commercial team |
The record capture we build
- The commercial team sets up events as soon as something happens that may matter later, such as late information, a client change or restricted access.
- The site manager completes a short daily record on a phone or tablet: weather, resources by area and activity, what was affected and by which event, with photos.
- Labour and plant come from your timesheet and hire records where they are digital, so the site team confirms rather than types.
- Emails and letters about an event are filed against it from the project mailbox, with a person confirming the link.
- The commercial team sees each event with its daily records, photos, correspondence and linked costs in date order.
- Exports produce event chronologies and resource summaries in the format your team or advisers need.
What is claimed, and how, is for your commercial team and advisers to decide. The capture makes sure the records exist and can be found.
Records that are there when you need them
Site managers spend a few minutes a day on a structured record instead of a scrawled diary. Photos stop living on personal phones. When the commercial team needs to prepare a submission, the chronology for each event is already assembled, and the conversation is about what the records show rather than what they might have shown.
The same records help in other ways: answering the client's questions about progress, supporting extension of time discussions, and settling disputes with subcontractors about who was where.
Do your site records hold up?
- Site diaries are short, handwritten and inconsistent.
- Photos of delays sit on personal phones.
- Correspondence about an event is spread across inboxes.
- Preparing a submission means weeks of reconstruction.
- Records have been lost when a site manager moved on.