What is an obligation, and how does it become a protection?

An obligation is one duty a published document places on you for one job, with its clause, its window and what happens if you miss it. Section 76 of Queensland’s Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 is one: after you serve a payment claim, the principal has 15 business days to give you a payment schedule, and if it does not, the full claimed amount becomes payable. Demiton reads your payment claims against that window, so a schedule that has not arrived is flagged on business day 16, not discovered at adjudication.

Every obligation guards against one of the five diseases. The s 76 window guards against disputes. A missed extension-of-time notice under AS 4000 guards against missed claims. A late Taxable Payments Annual Report guards against lapsed compliance.

From a document to a protection

Reading order: one example per row, read left to right; each arrow names what the step produces, and the disease the protection guards against is in brackets. Every row is a real entry in the obligation library.

SOURCE        INSTRUMENT                          OBLIGATION                             PROTECTION
Contract      AS 4000-1997            --states--> claim an EOT within 28 days  --arms--> Watch
              cl 34.2                             of the delay starting                  (missed claims)

Law           BIF Act 2017 (Qld)      --states--> a payment schedule within 15 --arms--> Watch
              s 76                                business days of a claim               (disputes)

Law           Taxation Administration --states--> lodge the TPAR by 28 August  --arms--> Countdown
              Act 1953 (Cth), Sch 1               each year                              (lapsed compliance)

Principal     TMR MRTS50              --states--> hand over as-constructed     --arms--> Check
              cl 11.2                             records within 12 months               (rework)

Four words carry this page:

An instrument is one published document: an Act, a regulation, a contract form, a principal’s specification, a permit.
An obligation is one duty that instrument places on you, with its clause, its window and its consequence.
A protection is one obligation switched on for one of your jobs. Each protection runs daily from the day you switch it on.
The protection type is how Demiton runs it. There are four, listed below.

A protection that cannot run yet says why: the register it reads is empty, and it names the kind of system that would fill it (“your finance system”) before any vendor.

The seven sources

Every duty on a job comes from one of seven places. When you add a job, its obligations are grouped by these seven, and each source shows the instruments that apply to that job and why (“The site is in Queensland”, “Commonwealth law applies across Australia”).

The seven sources
Source	What it holds	Example in the library
Contract	The contract form you signed and its amendments. Demiton reads the conditions and every dated window.	AS 4000-1997, NZS 3910:2013, GC21
Law	Statute and regulation where the site is, and Commonwealth or national law that applies everywhere.	BIF Act 2017 (Qld), Construction Contracts Act 2002 (NZ)
Principal	Your client’s own specifications and conditions, which apply because that principal is on the job.	TMR MRTS50, Auckland Transport’s NZS 3910 special conditions
Approvals	The permits and consents this site holds.	None in the library yet
Counterparties	Funders, landowners, utilities and other parties whose terms bind the job.	None in the library yet
Workforce	Awards and agreements that cover the crew.	None in the library yet
Your own commitments	Certifications and protocols you have committed to yourself.	Society of Construction Law Delay and Disruption Protocol

A standard such as AS, ISO or an MRTS is not a source of its own. A standard binds a job only because a contract or a principal calls it up, so it enters through that source.

The four protection types

The four protection types
Type	What Demiton does	Example
Watch	Waits for the event that opens a window, then tracks the deadline.	A payment claim is served; the 15 business days for a schedule start.
Countdown	Counts down to a fixed date, flagged at 90, 30 and 7 days.	The TPAR due on 28 August.
Check	Looks for evidence that must exist, on a cadence.	As-constructed records held before the 12-month handover.
Threshold	Tracks a measure against the line it must not cross.	Cost to date against the tender budget. The library holds no threshold obligation yet.

The type and the disease are set separately. A watch can guard against disputes or missed claims; what decides the disease is what the missed duty costs you.

Where the obligation library lives

The library is public, in the demitonapp/registers repository on GitHub. Each instrument is one file, filed under the place it binds (Queensland law under AU-QLD, Commonwealth law under AU), and every obligation in it carries a primary citation: the URL of the instrument, the clause, and the date it was read. Anyone can read it, and the product reads the same files.

The repository publishes public instruments only. Your contract, your amendments and any obligation you add to your own job are never published there; they stay in your organisation’s record.

Where the library is thin

On 30 September 2026 the library held 247 obligations from 70 instruments. They are not spread evenly:

By source: law 133, contract 60, principal 33, approvals 14, your own commitments 6, workforce 1. Counterparties holds none yet: an insurer’s notification clause lives in the policy a particular organisation holds, not in a published instrument.
By place: New South Wales 45, Queensland 40, Western Australia 20, the ACT 15, Victoria 14, South Australia 12, Tasmania 11, the Northern Territory 9. Commonwealth law adds 32 to every Australian job. New Zealand national instruments hold 48; of the 17 regions, only Auckland holds its own (1).

When you add a job, Demiton states how many obligations the library holds for that job’s place, and says plainly when that is few. A job in the Northern Territory draws 9 obligations from Northern Territory instruments against 45 in New South Wales, and the screen says so. The current count for every state and region is on the obligation library by place page.

Adding an obligation the library does not hold

You know your jobs better than the library does. There are two ways to close a gap:

For your job only. Add the obligation to the job as a private obligation, with its clause and window. It is protected from that day, and it never leaves your organisation.
For everyone. If the obligation comes from a public instrument (an Act, a regulation, a published specification), propose it to the library: open an issue or a pull request on demitonapp/registers with the instrument, the clause and a link to the source. Demiton reviews every obligation before it merges, and it reaches every customer on the next library release. Not on GitHub? Send it to us and we will raise it.

What runs today

The library is live: the daily disputes check reads it. The screen where you add a job, see its obligations source by source, add a private one and switch each one on is being built, along with the in-app action that proposes an obligation to the library. Until that screen ships, the five daily checks run as they do now, and this page describes what that screen does.

Next steps

The five diseases - what each obligation guards against
What a register is - the record a protection reads
Glossary - obligation, instrument, source, protection and the rest in one place

Talk to the team

Tell us what you run - your ERP, field, payroll and document systems - and we will show you the registers Demiton would fill from them, on your data, in a 30-minute call.

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