DOCUMENTS & PROJECTS
Registers
Every project carries a Registers band in the sidebar — the records you check, kept separate from the feed of things that need you and the tools you run. Between them the registers cover the state of the job: what changed and what it is worth, who is holding which drawing revision, what the contract obliges you to do, where the time went, what has been claimed and paid, and what security someone is still holding against you.
Overview
A register answers one question: what is the state of X, right now? It is a record you consult, sort, export and hand to other people — a subcontractor, a certifier, an adjudicator. It is not a to-do list, and it does not chase you.
Registers are not summaries generated on demand. Each one is a live view over the underlying records — document lineages, extracted obligations, delay events, commercial changes, claims and security instruments — so a row in a register is always backed by the documents and events that put it there. Open the row and you land on the thing itself.
Two rules that hold for every register
Rows are backed, never invented. A register never composes a figure or a status out of thin air; it reads the typed records underneath and shows you what they say.
Retrieval is permission-filtered to the person asking. Two people can open the same register on the same project and correctly see different rows — the register shows each of them the records they are entitled to. See Permissions.
A project's left sidebar with the REGISTERS band open — Commercial, Distribution, Obligations, Delays & EOT, Claims and Security stacked between the Work and Knowledge bands, with the Distribution row active.
The registers band
The band sits in the project sidebar and holds the following registers. Each one is its own page, with its own filters and its own row actions.
| Register | What it records |
|---|---|
| Commercial | The change record for the project and the variations minted from it — what changed, who directed it, and what it is worth. Splits into two tabs: Changes and Variations. |
| Distribution | Which revision each company is holding right now — every document you have sent out, one row per document lineage, one column per counterparty. |
| Obligations | Every deliverable, submittal and obligation in your contracts — one row each, cited to its clause. |
| Delays & EOT | Each delay event with its cited evidence pack, its critical-path impact and the served-notice trail behind it. |
| Claims | Progress claims in both directions and where the money actually is — claimed, certified, paid. |
| Security | Every retention and bank guarantee a counterparty holds against you, when it must come back, and the chase that gets it back. |
Two further registers — insurances and RFIs — are rolling out and appear only where they have been enabled for your workspace.
The rest of this page covers what the registers have in common, then the Distribution register in depth because it carries two capabilities the others build on: lineage rows and as-at time travel. The commercial registers have pages of their own — see the claims register, delay substantiation, variations and the obligations register.
Registers, the Watcher and tools
Three different things live in a project sidebar and they are deliberately not mixed. Getting the distinction straight is the fastest way to know where to look.
| Surface | Question it answers | What you do with it |
|---|---|---|
| A register | What is the state of X, right now? | Consult it, filter it, export it, hand it to someone else. |
| The Watcher | What needs me right now? | Work the feed down. Everything that does not need you today stays in its register. |
| A tool | None — a tool is something you run. | Kick it off, like a compliance chase campaign or an evidence pack. |
The Watcher describes itself exactly that way: what needs you right now — missing register entries, clocks running, decisions waiting and documents that disagree. Everything else lives in its register. The two surfaces are complements. The register is the whole population; the Watcher is the slice of it that is on fire.
Where recovery findings went
Recovery findings — events shaped like money with no register row — used to sit on a register page of their own. They now surface in the Watcher under the group heading Missing from registers, which is where they belong: each one is a prompt to create a row, not a row in its own right. Four kinds are detected:
- Directed work with no variation — someone was told to do something and no variation was ever raised for it.
- Delay evidence with no notice — the diaries and weather support a delay, but nothing was served.
- A revision change with no variation link — a drawing moved and no commercial change followed it.
- A docket never claimed — signed work that appears on no progress claim.
A missing row is the expensive kind of gap
The rows you are looking at are the easy ones. The money leaks through work that was done, directed and documented but never made it onto any register at all — which is precisely the population the Watcher’s missing-from-registers group exists to surface. Clear it, and the registers become a complete record rather than a partial one.Registers that share a row
Some registers are the same object seen from another side. Rather than give every one of them its own sidebar row and let the band sprawl, siblings share a single row and split into tabs across the top of the page.
| Sidebar row | Tabs | Why they are together |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial | Changes · Variations | A variation is minted from a commercial change. It is the same story at two stages of itself — the change that happened, and the claim for it you can actually price. |
Each tab is a real route with its own URL — the tabs change how you find a register, not what it is. That matters because deep links keep working: an alert, a digest line, an assistant citation or a bookmark that points at the variations register still resolves straight to it, and simply opens with the right tab selected. If you live in one tab all day, bookmark that tab rather than the parent row.
The Distribution register
The Distribution register answers the document controller’s oldest question: who has what? Rows are document lineages and columns are counterparties, so one glance shows which revision each company was sent, when, and whether they have opened it. Amber means that company is holding a revision older than yours.
Rows are lineages, not files
A lineage is the whole life of a document — the original issue and every revision after it — treated as one thing. When a supplier returns a revised version of something you issued, the returned document joins the same lineage rather than appearing as an unrelated file. That is what lets a single row truthfully say “Rev C is current, Rev B is superseded, and this counterparty still holds Rev A.”
What each cell tells you
Every row-by-counterparty cell carries the distribution facts for that pairing:
- Status — whether the counterparty holds the current revision, a superseded one, was never sent the document, or has been sent it and not yet opened it.
- Version and timestamps — which revision went out, when it was sent, and when it was first opened.
- Channel — how the document reached them: an Exchange share, email, the assistant, a notice, or a transmittal.
- Evidence grade — whether the link is proof (the file demonstrably travelled) or probable (a fuzzy association). The register never dresses a guess up as a receipt.
No fake read receipts
Open tracking is only shown for channels that actually support it. A document sent by plain email has no read receipt, and the register says so rather than implying tracking that does not exist.From any cell you can re-issue the current revision to a counterparty who is behind — the register is where you notice the gap and close it in the same motion.
The Distribution register grid: document lineage rows down the left with their current revision labels, counterparty columns across the top, and cells showing mixed statuses — current, amber superseded, awaiting open — with sent and opened timestamps visible in an expanded cell popover.
As-at time travel
The register has a time machine. Set the As at date and the whole grid re-renders as it stood on that day: which revisions existed, who had been sent what, and what each counterparty had opened — as of that moment, not as of now.
This is the question disputes actually turn on. Not “what is the current drawing?” but “what did the subcontractor hold on the day they poured the slab?” The as-at view answers it from the distribution record rather than from anyone’s memory.
You can also download the as-at register as an evidence pack — a machine-readable snapshot of the register as it stood at your chosen date, suitable for attaching to a claim, a notice, or a dispute file.
Why the record matters before the argument starts
Of 990 adjudication applications lodged in NSW in FY24-25, 212 were withdrawn and 44 timed out before a determination was released (Building Commission NSW, Q4 FY24-25 report) — outcomes decided by records and deadlines before any adjudicator read the merits. A register that can prove who held what, when, is the record half of that equation.Registers the AI can read
Registers are not just screens. The assistant reads them directly — the same rows, through the same permission filter as the person asking — rather than re-reading the source documents and re-deriving an answer. So when you ask a register question in plain language, the answer matches what the register shows you, down to the row.
| Ask this | It reads |
|---|---|
| “Who is still on a superseded revision of the level 3 slab drawing?” | Distribution |
| “What variations are still unapproved, and what are they worth?” | Commercial — Changes and Variations |
| “Which contract obligations are overdue this month?” | Obligations |
| “How many delay days have we substantiated, and which ones were noticed?” | Delays & EOT, plus the issued-notice trail |
| “How much have we certified but not been paid?” | Claims, plus the cost position |
| “What retention is still held against us and when is it due back?” | Security |
| “What is our cash position over the next 90 days?” | A rollup across claims, variations and security |
| “What approved variations have we never billed?” | Claims reconciled against Commercial |
The assistant can also run the cross-register rollups — the cost position, the cash-flow outlook, unbilled variations, back-to-back gaps between what you owe upstream and what you have secured downstream, and the clock position against a single counterparty. All of it is read-only: the assistant reports the register, it does not quietly edit it.
What else reads the registers
- Routines — a routine can be triggered by a register change, so “when a variation is approved, do this” is a rule rather than a habit.
- The daily digest — register movement becomes digest lines on Today, so the day opens with what shifted overnight.
- Evidence packs — a pack snapshots register state at the moment it is assembled, so the state it cites cannot drift out from under it after you send it.