The deadlines hiding in your subcontract
Every subcontract carries two sets of deadlines: the ones everyone knows (the application date, the final date for payment) and the ones that only surface when money is already being argued about. The second set is where accounts quietly lose value.
Updated: 22 August 2026
The usual suspects: a pay less notice period shortened by amendment, so the response window you think you have does not exist. A loss and expense clause made conditional on notice within days of the event, so the right dies before anyone knew it existed. NEC's clause 61.3, which can bar a compensation event not notified within eight weeks of awareness. Retention release dates tied to events on the main contract you cannot see. Insurance and bond expiries that nobody owns. Rectification periods that decide when the second half of retention is even arguable.
None of these is hard to meet once it is visible. All of them are routinely missed, for one reason: they live in the amendments, and the amendments get read once, at signing, under time pressure, and never again.
The fix is unglamorous: re-derive every deadline from the executed documents, put each one in a register that counts down and flags what is close, give every deadline an owner, and only ever close one by recording the date it was met. Ten minutes a week watching a register is the cheapest commercial protection a subcontractor can buy: it just has to be built from the real contract, not the standard form.
Where to go next
The free Notice & Deadline Register is built for exactly this: every deadline on every live contract, one row each, counting down. And the Deadline Diary is the built-for-you version, populated from your executed documents.