Proving what happened on site
Disputes are rarely won by whoever is right. They are won by whoever can show what happened, on which day, with something better than memory. The good news is that the records that settle arguments are cheap to keep and take seconds a day. The bad news is that they are worthless if you start keeping them after the argument begins.
The site diary is the one that matters
If you keep only one record, keep this. A daily entry saying who was on site, what was done, and what got in the way is the document that decides delay and variation claims, because it is contemporaneous. Written at the time, before anyone knew it would matter.
That is precisely why it carries weight and why a diary reconstructed afterwards does not. An adjudicator or a judge can tell the difference between a record kept as the job ran and one assembled in a hurry with a dispute already underway.
A useful entry takes a minute:
- Who was there. Your crew, the other trades, the supervisor who gave the instruction.
- What was done, in enough detail to mean something in a year. "Ran submains, level 2" beats "site works".
- What stopped you. Rain, no access, the slab not poured, waiting on another trade, an instruction to hold. Delay claims live and die here.
- What you were told, and by whom. Verbal instructions are the seed of most variation fights. Writing down who said what, on the day, is the cheapest insurance in the trade.
Photos, with the date attached
Photograph what you found, not just what you built. The value is almost always in the before: the switchboard that was already full, the corroded cable, the wall that was out of square, the damage that was there when you arrived. Nobody disputes the finished work. They dispute whether the extra was necessary.
Two rules make photos useful rather than decorative. They need to be attached to the job, not sitting in a camera roll with four thousand others. And they need their date, which is exactly what gets lost when a photo is screenshotted, forwarded through a chat app and saved again.
Photograph the thing you are about to cover up. Anything that will be behind a wall, under a slab or inside a ceiling gets one photo before it disappears. That single habit has settled more arguments than any contract clause, because the alternative is opening the wall to find out.
Get variations in writing, on the day
The most expensive words in the trade are "yeah, just do it, we'll sort it out". They are said in good faith, and they are remembered differently once the invoice arrives, not usually through dishonesty, but because the person who said it has had four hundred conversations since.
Price it, send it, get it approved before the work starts. If that is impossible because the job cannot stop, then write down what was instructed, by whom, at what time, and send it to them the same day so there is a record they received it. A message they did not object to is a great deal better than nothing.
Who was on site, and their tickets
Site sign-on records do two jobs. They prove attendance for delay and labour claims, and they show that the people on your site were qualified to be there. If an incident happens, the second one stops being paperwork and starts being the thing that determines your position.
The same goes for licences and tickets generally: knowing they are current before someone starts is the whole point, because finding out afterwards that a ticket expired mid-job is a problem no record can fix.
Sign off the completion
Get the customer's name against the finished work at handover, on the day, while you are standing there and they are happy. It closes the job, it starts the clock on payment, and it is remarkably hard to argue later that the work was never completed when there is a signature saying it was.
Typing a name to accept work is an electronic signature and is generally effective in Australia under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 and its state equivalents, provided the person consented to signing that way and it is clear who signed.
Keep it for longer than feels necessary
Tax records have their own rule, five years. But defects and building claims can surface long after that, and the limitation periods for construction work in most states run for years, with some jurisdictions setting much longer outer limits for building actions. Storage is cheap. Regret is not. Keep the job record for the life of the liability, not the life of the invoice.
Jobdeck keeps these records as a by-product of the work. The site diary is a minute at knock-off and works with no signal, syncing when the phone finds bars again, which matters, because the jobs with no reception are the jobs that go wrong. Photos attach to the job rather than a camera roll. Variations are priced, sent, and approved by the customer in writing with the date on it. Site sign-ons, tickets and SWMS sit with the job, and the customer signs the completion on your phone before you leave.
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Related: Everything that happened on a job, in one place · Progress claims and Security of Payment