The project’s contemporaneous memory — and, in a dispute, the document that decides who pays.
Last updated
Zepth Core module
$60M+
the average US construction dispute — and over a year to resolve
Arcadis 2025
1 in 5
projects worldwide affected by poor contract management and administration
HKA CRUX Insight
35%
of the working week lost to chasing information and resolving conflicts
FMI research
The daily report is the project’s contemporaneous memory: who was on site, what was built, what the weather did, what went wrong, and who instructed what. On a good day it is a management tool. In a dispute it is the document that decides who pays — because tribunals trust the record written that evening over the recollection written for the arbitration.
Zepth replaces the blank page at 6pm with structured capture in minutes: manpower, plant, weather, progress, delays and instructions in a consistent format, photos attached, every entry timestamped. Countersignature workflows bring the consultant into the record where the contract expects it.
Construction law has a famous maxim, from Max Abrahamson: a party to a dispute will learn three lessons, often too late.
“the importance of records, the importance of records and the importance of records”
In Attorney General for the Falkland Islands v Gordon Forbes Construction, the court held that witness statements produced after the event cannot substitute for missing contemporary records. If the diary wasn’t written at the time, no amount of later testimony fills the hole.
FIDIC 2017 makes the duty explicit: the claiming party must keep “such contemporary records as may be necessary to substantiate the Claim”, and the engineer may monitor the records and instruct further ones. The SCL Delay & Disruption Protocol’s very first core principle is simply: contractor to keep good records.
There is no published figure for how many claims fail on poor records, and we won’t invent one. The authorities are the argument.
They are the substrate of every EOT claim. Delay entitlement is proven by linking an event to specific impacted activities — which crews, which zones, which idle plant, which dates. That linkage lives in the daily reports or nowhere. Diaries that exist but say nothing useful fail the same way: a claim built on weeks of “work ongoing, no delays” entries is rebutted by its own records.
Weather entitlement runs through the diary. “Exceptionally adverse climatic conditions” under FIDIC are proven by comparing what the diary recorded — conditions AND impact (“high winds — crane operations halted 10:00–14:00”) — against long-term meteorological baselines. No diary entry, no starting point.
Verbal instructions get captured or get expensive. The instruction given at the workface and never confirmed is a classic dispute seed. The diary is its first, and often only, contemporaneous trace.
Divergence between diaries is itself evidence. The contractor’s diary and the consultant’s inspector diary get compared in disputes. A countersigned daily report — contractor prepares, resident engineer countersigns, standard on many FIDIC projects — is close to unchallengeable.
Date and project. Weather — conditions and operational impact. Manpower by trade and subcontractor, with headcounts. Plant on site, working versus idle: idle plant is disruption evidence. Work executed with locations and quantities. Materials delivered. Delays and their causes. Instructions received, especially verbal ones. Visitors and inspections. Safety events. Photos.
The claims-practice gold standard is a single test: a stranger to the project should be able to reconstruct the day from the record alone.
The failure is rarely the absence of a form — it is silent diaries, generic entries, and after-the-fact writing. “Work ongoing” tells a tribunal nothing except that nothing was worth recording. Reports compiled on Thursday for Monday — visible forever in digital metadata — lose their contemporaneous status.
Blame-laden editorialising (“MEP sub is delaying us”) gets dismantled in cross-examination, where “MEP subcontractor: 4 fitters against 10 planned, Zone B” would have been unanswerable. Record facts, not verdicts.
The record survives cross-examination — contemporaneous, timestamped, and specific enough that a stranger could reconstruct the day from it.
EOT entitlement is provable — the event links to the crews, zones, idle plant and dates it actually impacted.
Verbal instructions leave a trace on the day they are given, not in a witness statement two years later.
The 30–60 minutes a day comes back, and the record gets more complete, not less.
Manpower, plant, weather, progress, delays and instructions in a consistent format — minutes, not a blank page at 6pm.
Idle plant is disruption evidence, so it is a field rather than an afterthought.
Contractor prepares, resident engineer countersigns — the record the contract expects, captured where the contract expects it.
Timestamped, geotagged photographs attached to the entries they support, not filed separately.
The diary entry, the linked activity, the photos and the weather are one story per day — not four systems to reconcile during a claim.
Manpower, plant (working and idle), weather with its operational impact, work executed with locations, materials, delays and their causes, instructions received. Structured fields, not a blank page.
Photos, geotagged and timestamped, against the entries they support. The metadata is what establishes authenticity later.
The site manager signs the same day. Where the contract provides, the resident engineer countersigns: a countersigned diary is close to unchallengeable.
Weekly and monthly progress narratives drawn from the dailies, so the reports agree with the record by construction rather than by effort.
When a delay event surfaces, the diary entries, weather, idle plant, affected activities and photos assemble into one chronology — rather than four filing systems and a month of paralegal time.
Drafts the day’s report from what the platform already knows — logged activities, attendance, inspections raised, photos captured — for the site manager to verify, complete and sign. The 30–60 minutes a day comes back, and the record gets more complete, not less.
Days with thin or generic entries against high recorded activity get flagged — the “silent diary” problem caught while the day is still fresh enough to fix.
When a delay event occurs, every relevant contemporaneous thread — diary entries, weather, idle plant, affected activities, photos — is pulled into a chronology in minutes rather than a paralegal-month.
Weekly and monthly progress reports drafted from the dailies, consistent with the record by construction rather than by effort.
The engineer’s judgment stays in charge; the AI removes the latency and the blind spots.
The full diary, searchable and retrievable by date, zone, trade and event — with weather, manpower, plant, delays, instructions and photographs on the same record. Weekly and monthly progress narratives roll up from the dailies, and a delay chronology can be assembled on demand.
Yes — contemporaneous project records are primary factual evidence in adjudication and arbitration, and are weighted far above after-the-fact witness statements. Gordon Forbes is the standard authority: witness statements produced after the event cannot substitute for missing contemporary records.
Read the full answerWeather with its impact, manpower by trade, plant (working and idle), work executed with locations, materials delivered, delays and causes, instructions received, visitors, safety events, and photos. Facts, not blame.
The contractor’s site manager or section engineer, the same day, signed — and countersigned by the consultant’s representative where the contract provides. The consultant’s inspector typically keeps a parallel diary.
Realistically, no. FIDIC 2017 expressly requires contemporary records to substantiate claims, and tribunals will not let witness statements reconstruct what the records should have captured.
Read the full answerThe diary proves what happened and what it stopped; meteorological data proves it was exceptional against the long-term baseline. You need both — the entitlement is built from the comparison.
Generally yes: immutable timestamps, geotagged photos and edit trails establish authenticity. The same metadata also exposes retrospective writing — which is exactly why tribunals trust it.
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