Disputes

In Queensland a disputed payment claim gives the contractor 30 business days to apply for adjudication, and the other side 10 to answer one. Neither clock is the hard part. The hard part is what the adjudicator reads: the diary for the day the direction was given, the photos, the docket, the programme as it stood that week. The supervisor who should have written that diary had a crew to run and a truck waiting, and a missing entry costs nothing on the day it is missed. It costs everything eight months later, when the claim is argued on the record and the record has a hole where the day should be. A dispute can be lost on one day nobody wrote down while people still remembered it.

At a glance

What it is

The claim that became a case.

The protection

If the day's record isn't in by evening, you're told which one is missing while people still remember the day.

Running today

Contract terms, day works dockets and rate verifications sit in one queryable record, and every active project is checked each morning against 125 published evidence standards for its jurisdiction and contract form - met, at risk, missed or unmeasurable. The check runs; it has not yet been proved on a live job.

Where it starts

Every dispute verdict is filed under one of five causes: why the claim or the defence did not hold. A claim never made is a forfeited entitlement, not a dispute.

Cause	What it covers
Payment	What is owed for work done: a progress claim cut or ignored, a payment schedule, set-off against the claim, an adjudication under the security of payment act.
Delay and extensions of time	Who carries the time: an extension refused, liquidated damages deducted, a delay analysis argued against the programme.
Variations	Whether the work was a change and what it is worth: scope, direction, valuation, a docket the other side says was always in the contract.
Latent conditions	Whether the ground was foreseeable: what the site information showed, what a competent tenderer would have allowed for, when notice was given.
Close-out	The end of the job: practical completion, defects, the final account, retention and securities held past their release date.

What the daily check needs

The disputes check runs once the organisation holds:

• Data on the contract terms register
• Data on any one of the progress claim, retention position, payment schedule, programme, day works docket or site diary registers

Registers that feed it

These registers add evidence to a dispute verdict. Each linked name is a published register contract.

• Contract terms contract_terms
• Retention position retention_position
• Subcontract subcontract
• Document transmittal document_transmittal
• Diary photo observation diary_photo_observation
• Rfi rfi
• Site diary site_diary
• Contract notice contract_notice
• Bank guarantee bank_guarantee
• Diary compliance assessment diary_compliance_assessment
• Daily log daily_log
• Site activity site_activity
• Attendance record attendance_record
• Drawing register drawing_register
• Project milestone project_milestone

Next steps

• The five diseases - the other four, and why they are one problem
• Obligations - the security of payment windows, state by state
• Forfeited entitlements - the claim that was never made
• Register catalog - the contract registers