What records do I need for a loss and expense claim?

Loss and expense, the JCT term for the money side of employer caused delay and disruption, is won or lost on two families of records and the thread between them. The cause family proves what happened: notices and applications made in time, instructions and drawing revisions with dates, site diaries and photographs, progress records and minutes that show the event landing on the works. The cost family proves what it cost: allocation sheets putting named operatives against locations and activities, plant and supervision time, invoices, payroll, and the tender build up that sets the baseline the overspend is measured against. The thread is the discipline of keeping them connectable: a diary that names the area affected on the day the revised drawing arrived, an allocation sheet that splits disrupted work from clean work, because the difference between a claim and a grievance is that an assessor can follow a pound from event to invoice. What kills claims is records kept for other purposes: payroll proves people were paid, not where their hours went, and a global overspend proves only that the job went badly, which is the argument the other side wants you to make.

Say a fit out subcontractor loses eleven weeks to phased handovers that never happened as programmed. Its file holds the notice served in week one, every revised access date in writing, and daily allocation sheets splitting hours between the two floors it could reach and the three it could not. The prolongation is priced from actual site running costs over the extra weeks, and the disruption from output on the open floors against output on the same trades before the churn began. The assessor can trace every figure to a document with a date on it, and the claim settles close to full value without a delay expert ever being appointed. The lesson is that the records decide the number before anyone argues, and they can only be kept while the job is running.