Site photos and diaries: what actually counts as evidence?

Adjudicators and judges share one working prejudice, and it is the key to this whole page: a record made at the time, by someone who was there, beats a better-written account produced later. Contemporaneity is the currency. Everything below is just that principle applied to the documents a small job actually generates.

What makes a record survive

• A date it did not choose for itself. The email’s timestamp, the photo’s metadata, the WhatsApp thread’s running clock. This is why the confirmation text beats the recollection, and why the confirmed verbal instruction is a payment document while the remembered one is a story.
• An author who was there, identifiable, writing about that day. A diary in one hand, kept daily, gains weight with every boring entry; boring entries are what prove the habit was real.
• Made for the job, not for the fight. Records created in the ordinary course, day sheets, delivery notes, valuation build-ups, read as facts. Documents that first exist after the dispute started read as submissions, whatever they are called.
• Signed where signing was possible. A daywork sheet signed by the other side that week, even signed as record only, is worth ten unsigned ones, because it proves the facts were shown to the other side when they could still object.

The site diary: ten minutes that win arguments

One page a day, same format, kept even when nothing happened: who was on site, what was worked on, what arrived, what waited and why, weather, visitors, anything said that mattered. Two of those lines are load-bearing for money: what waited and why is the raw material of every delay claim, and the weather line is what turns “it rained a lot” into the comparison an exceptional weather claim needs. The habit survives because it is short; the diary that takes half an hour dies in a fortnight.

Photos: date, place, purpose

Photograph progress weekly and events immediately: what is about to be covered up, the state of areas you are blamed for, opening-up, deliveries, the works on the day everything stopped. Keep them in the phone’s stream where the metadata lives, backed up, organised by job, and resist the urge to curate: the boring wide shot of the whole room places the dramatic close-up in space, and a set with gaps invites the question of what the gaps held.

What fails, and why people still try it

The reconstructed diary, written in one sitting with one pen and suspiciously perfect recall. The undated photo folder named “evidence”. The witness statement doing work the missing documents should have done. Each fails the same way: it asks the decider to trust memory where paper should exist, and in a documents forum, the absence of the paper is itself read as evidence. On jobs the Construction Act covers, adjudication (section 108) is fast and paper-driven, 28 days leaves no room for oral drama; for a residential occupier job the forum is the county court (section 106), slower but no fonder of reconstruction.

What to do this week

1. Start the diary tomorrow morning, one page, ten minutes, and put the reminder where you will see it at the same hour daily.

2. Set the photo habit: weekly walk-through, plus immediately before anything gets covered up.

3. Do one hour of filing on the live job, emails, delivery notes, sheets, into one place per job, because a record that cannot be found in month eighteen might as well not exist.

Where the information stops

What weight your particular records will carry in your particular dispute is the adviser’s call, made once they have seen the file, and the best moment to show a professional your records is before the dispute, when the gaps can still be filled by habit rather than by argument.