Forfeited entitlements

Under AS 4000 the number is 28: the days a contractor has from the start of a delay to claim the extension of time for it. The superintendent’s direction comes on site, or the rain comes in the night, and the project manager does the right thing for the job, which is to keep it moving. Writing the claim is the thing that can wait until Friday. Clause 34.3 does not care why it waited. On day 29 the entitlement is not reduced; it is gone, and the time and money the contract allowed were spent for free. The work was always real. Whether it gets paid comes down to a date.

Weather lives here. A wet day the contract entitled you to claim, and nobody claimed, is a forfeited entitlement like any other: Demiton correlates the site diary against Bureau of Meteorology observations for the same site, so the rain day is on the record before the window shuts.

At a glance

What it is

Variations and time owed but never claimed: notices missed, time bars closed, wet days never logged.

Also called

Missed claims, on demiton.io and in sales material.

The protection

When the instruction arrives or the rain starts, the clock starts. The notice is drafted and waiting before the window shuts, while the ground is still wet.

Running today

Every variation, progress claim and contract clause is in one register you can query by project and date, and site diaries carry the weather on the day correlated against Bureau of Meteorology observations for the same location - so a notice window or a wet-weather claim is a question you can ask, not a date buried in an inbox or a claim reconstructed from memory weeks later.

Where it starts

Every forfeited entitlement verdict is filed under one of five causes: the step between the event and the cash where the entitlement was lost.

Cause	What it covers
Penalty days	Time owed but never claimed, so liquidated damages run: a wet day never logged, a client delay with no extension-of-time notice, a programme never updated to show the critical path moved.
Variations	Work directed but never priced: an instruction on site, an RFI answer that changed the scope, a day-works docket that never became a variation.
Latent conditions	Ground or site the contract did not show: rock, contamination, groundwater, services not on the drawings. The notice periods are short and run from discovery.
Delay costs	The time was granted but the money was not claimed: prolongation, plant on standby, extended preliminaries and site overheads, disruption to the planned sequence.
Payment and retention	Money already earned that never arrives: a payment claim not served by its reference date, a schedule left unanswered, a price adjustment not claimed in its window, retention or a security never released.

What the daily check needs

The forfeited entitlements check runs once the organisation holds:

• Data on the contract terms register
• Data on any one of the site diary, day works docket or variations registers

When the notice is served, it is recorded in the app against the window, and the window closes as lodged.

Registers that feed it

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

• Contract terms contract_terms
• Variations variations
• Change event change_event
• Day works docket day_works_docket
• Site diary site_diary
• Platform weather platform_weather
• Rfi rfi
• Progress claim progress_claim
• Payment schedule payment_schedule
• Programme programme
• Tender baseline active tender_baseline_active
• Contract notice contract_notice
• Project milestone project_milestone
• Daily log daily_log
• Site activity site_activity
• Claim line observation claim_line_observation

Next steps

• The five diseases - the other four, and why they are one problem
• Obligations - every notice window and time bar Demiton reads, clause by clause
• Disputes - what a claim becomes when the record behind it is thin
• Register catalog - the contract registers