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Delay substantiation & evidence packs
An extension-of-time claim lives or dies on its particulars — what happened, when, what the contract says about it, and what it did to the programme. Alloovium assembles that case from the records you already keep: site diaries, weather, contract clauses and the schedule, every factual line cited back to its source.
Overview
The traditional way to substantiate a delay is a forensic report: a consultant reconstructs the record months or years after the event, at a cost that routinely runs to tens of thousands of dollars per report — and the reconstruction is only as good as the paperwork that survived. Alloovium inverts that. Because the diaries, weather records, contract and schedule are already in the project corpus, the substantiation is assembled from contemporaneous records while they are still fresh, and every claim in the pack carries a citation you can click through to the source document.
The output is an evidence pack for a specific delay event: the narrative of what happened, the diary entries and weather records that prove it, the contract clauses that entitle you to time, and the schedule analysis that shows the delay actually consumed the programme rather than available float. Alongside the pack, every notice you issue for the event carries a served-on trail, so timeliness is provable, not remembered.
Where this fits in the loop
Delay substantiation is one link in the commercial control loop: the event is captured, the notice clock surfaces, the notice ships with receipts — and this page covers the part where the entitlement gets proven, not just preserved.The Delays & EOT register
Everything on this page starts in one place: the Delays & EOT register, in the Registers band of the project sidebar alongside the project’s other registers. Its subtitle states the job plainly — “Each delay’s cited evidence pack, critical-path impact and served-notice trail.” One row per delay event, and the primary action on the page is Log a delay.
| Column | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Delay | The event itself — what happened, as one row on the record. |
| Cause | A controlled list, so the register groups and filters honestly: Weather, Design / RFI, Principal instruction, Access, Subcontractor, Materials, Industrial, Latent condition, Other. |
| Days claimed | The extension of time being sought for this event. |
| Notice clock | Time left to serve — "Due in Nd", "Due today", "Overdue", or "—" where no deadline has been computed. The row detail spells it out as "Notice due {date}". |
| Status | Where the event sits in its lifecycle, from draft through to granted or rejected. |
The status lifecycle
A delay event moves through four states, and the register is ordered around the fact that the middle two are where the deadlines live.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | The event is on the record but nothing has been served — the notice clock is the thing to watch. |
| Notified | A notice has gone out; the entitlement is preserved and the served-on trail exists. |
| Claimed | The extension of time has been claimed, with the evidence pack behind it. |
| Granted / Rejected | The assessed outcome, kept against the event rather than in an inbox. |
The evidence pack in the row detail
Opening a row shows the delay’s evidence pack and when it was put together — Assembled {date}. The two empty states are deliberately honest rather than reassuring. “Not assembled yet — assemble the evidence to ground the notice.” means the case has not been built. The second one matters more: “Assembled {date} — no supporting records were found for this window.”
That is a pack that ran and came back empty, and it is the most useful thing the register can tell you — the record for those days is thin, and you know it before you serve rather than under challenge at adjudication.
The Delays & EOT register for a project — the subtitle 'Each delay's cited evidence pack, critical-path impact and served-notice trail', a 'Log a delay' action, and rows across Delay, Cause, Days claimed, Notice clock and Status columns, with notice clocks reading 'Due in 4d', 'Due today' and 'Overdue', and an expanded row showing its assembled evidence pack.
On a project with nothing logged the register says so — “No delays recorded” / “Log the first delay to start assembling its evidence pack and notice.”
Ask about delays in chat
The register is readable by the assistant, read-only and filtered to what you are permitted to see. It can list the delay events on a project and, separately, the notices that were actually served — so “which delays are noticed but not yet claimed?” is answered from these rows rather than reconstructed.What an evidence pack cites
A delay evidence pack pulls from four kinds of record, each contributing a different part of the case.
| Source | What it proves |
|---|---|
| Site diaries | The contemporaneous account — what happened on the affected days, in the words recorded at the time, including voice diaries filed from site calls |
| Weather records | The conditions on the days claimed, matched to the delay window rather than asserted from memory |
| Contract clauses | The entitlement itself — the extension-of-time clause engaged, the notice regime it imposes, cited to the executed contract for this project |
| Schedule | The programme impact — where the delay landed, what it pushed, and how it reconciles against available float |
Every factual line in the assembled pack carries a citation back to the source document, so reviewing the pack means checking receipts rather than re-deriving the case. The same records that answer “what happened in week 14?” in the assistant are the ones the pack cites — one corpus, one set of facts.
Float reconciliation
A delay that fits inside available float is not an extension-of-time entitlement, and an assessor will check. The pack does that check first: each delay is reconciled against the schedule to establish whether it exceeds the float available on the affected work, and the reconciliation is part of the pack rather than an argument you have to construct under challenge.
That cuts both ways deliberately. A pack that shows a delay consumed only float is a claim you chose not to send — which is cheaper than a claim that came back rejected with your credibility spent.
The served-on trail
Entitlement to time usually hangs on a notice served within a contractual window. For every notice issued through Alloovium, the record keeps a served-on trail: what was served, to whom, and when. When the claim is assessed months later, timeliness is a record you point to, not a recollection you defend.
Notice first, substantiation behind it
The notice preserves the entitlement; the pack proves it. Because both ride the same record, the notice you served and the evidence behind it stay attached to the same delay event — the assessor sees one coherent trail from the day it happened to the day it was claimed.
The delays page
The Delays & EOT register described above is also the working view for the month-end pass: the delay events on the record, their status, the notices served against them and the evidence assembled so far. It answers the question the question every commercial manager asks at month end — “which delays are live, which are noticed, and which are still unsubstantiated?”
A delay event lands on the record
From a site call, a diary entry, an email or a direct entry — captured while the evidence is hours old, not months.
The notice goes out with a served-on trail
The entitlement is preserved inside the contractual window, and service is provable.
The evidence pack assembles the case
Diaries, weather, clauses and schedule cited into one pack, with the float reconciliation done.
The claim goes in substantiated
Particulars, not assertions — assembled at claim time, when they can still be considered.
Why particulars decide EOT claims
The case law is blunt about what kills extension-of-time claims, and it is rarely the merits.
- In Rimfire Energy v BSF Co (No 2)[2025] FCA 384, six EOT claims totalling 865 days combined across two respondents were all held invalid — not because they were late, but because the notices lacked the “detailed particulars of the Extension Event” the contract required. Liquidated damages of $1.4M per respondent stood.
- In Builtcom v VSD Investments (No 2) [2025] NSWCA 134, $30.6M was claimed and $8.47M awarded — roughly $22.1M went unvalued because the supporting documents first arrived with the adjudication application. Evidence served after the claim may never be considered, and the court did not fix it.
- Across NSW adjudications in FY24-25, $170.2M was adjudicated against $252.4M claimed on released determinations (~67%), and only about a third of determinations awarded the full amount — evidence quality is the delta between the claim and the cheque.
Substantiation is not optional paperwork
A timely notice with thin particulars can be as dead as a late one. The point of assembling the pack at claim time — diaries, weather, clauses, schedule, cited — is that the particulars exist when the contract demands them, not two years later in a consultant's reconstruction.