Hi. It’s me again, Anthony from Contractors Debt Recovery. A little talk to you now about site diaries. They are unbelievably valuable at capturing what’s happened on the worksite every single day. This can be excellent evidence when a Security of Payment dispute rears its head. You want to be in a position to say what happened on the site that day, who gave directions, what contract works were done, what variation works were done, who cause any delays, what plans substituted, what photos were taken, what were the work hours done. All this needs to be recorded everyday in a site diary.

Now in order to do that and based on our experience, we’ve actually produced our own site diary which will be the subject of our other information you can get. But we’ve designed one specifically to fulfil that purpose because it is so important. Not only that, but the information in site diaries becomes contemporaneous evidence from the word contemporary meaning “at the time of”. So you can have excellent contemporaneous evidence. And in the dispute that evidence in the absence of anything proving an incorrect will stand as a record of what happened. So you don’t get into an argument over he said, she said, but you said etc. etc.

That just goes by the wayside and all just comes down to what you documented in your diary. It also allows you to use corroborating evidence. So you have external evidence, information, faxes, documentation that backs up what you’ve recorded in your diary. It makes your diary even more valid as a record of what occur. And it allows you finally to actually win disputes. If there’s an argument over what happened and what gave rise to a payment issue and you can go back to your diary and say well this is the events that led up to it and this the events that went after it. It just makes the evidence even more credible.

So just to summarize with your site diary it’s very important to complete an entry every single day you’ve done work on the site. It makes for excellent contemporaneous evidence. And finally and most importantly, it helps you win Security of Payment disputes. So get a site diary up and running in your business. It will only be good for you. See you next time.