crm
The Record That Survives a Dispute
What a contractor actually needs on file when a customer, an insurer or a licensing board asks what happened, and when each piece has to be created.
Most disputes are not about who is right. They are about who can show what happened, in what order, at the time.
That distinction decides outcomes. A contractor who did excellent work and kept nothing is in a weaker position than one who did adequate work and kept a dated file, and both of them find this out at the same moment: several months later, when memory is the only evidence either side has and the two memories disagree.
Evidence has to be contemporaneous
The single most important property of a record is when it was made.
A photograph taken on the day, with the date it was taken, is evidence. The same photograph produced later, with no way to establish when it was taken, is an assertion. A note written in the file on the afternoon of the conversation is evidence. The same note written during the dispute is advocacy, and everybody reading it can tell.
This is why reconstructing a file after a problem starts rarely works, and why the habit that matters is not "keep good records" in the abstract but "write it down the same day". The discipline is small and the difference in what it buys is very large.
The six things worth having on every job
What was agreed, signed and dated. The contract or signed proposal, with the version the customer actually saw. Not the final template. The document they signed.
What was handed over at signing, and when. For a sale made at the customer's home, the FTC cooling-off rule at 16 CFR 429.1 generally requires the seller to give the buyer a dated copy of the contract and a completed cancellation form stating the three-day right to cancel. State law often adds requirements on top. The fact worth recording is not just that you complied but the date you did, because the right runs from a date.
Condition before you started. Photographs of the work area, the surrounding property, and anything already damaged. This is the single cheapest record to make and the one most often missing. It takes ninety seconds and it settles the majority of "that was like that when you arrived" arguments permanently.
Every change, in writing, before it is done. Verbal change orders are the largest single source of payment disputes in residential work. The fix is not legalese, it is a one-paragraph message sent before the work happens that says what changed, what it costs, and that you will proceed on confirmation. A reply saying "yes go ahead" is a change order.
What was actually done, and when. Dates on site, who was there, what was completed each day. This matters for warranty questions years later and for any argument about delay.
Condition at completion, and the handover. Final photographs and whatever you gave the customer at the end: warranty terms, care instructions, material details. Customers forget what they were told. A dated list of what was handed over does not.
The records somebody else requires
Beyond the job file, two categories are not optional and have their own retention rules.
Employment and safety records. If you have employees, OSHA's recordkeeping requirements set out which injuries and illnesses must be recorded, on what forms, and for how long they must be kept. The obligations vary by employer size and industry, and the thresholds are the part people get wrong, so read the current rule rather than relying on what somebody told you in a previous job.
Tax records. The IRS publishes guidance on how long to keep records, and the answer depends on what the record supports rather than being a single number. Property records in particular run much longer than the three years people remember, because the period relates to the disposal of the property, not to the year of purchase.
Both of those are retention floors, not filing advice. A job file that gets deleted at the same cadence as an email thread will eventually be deleted before the obligation on it expires.
Where it has to live
All of this is worth nothing if it is distributed across a phone gallery, a text thread, two email accounts and a filing cabinet.
The practical requirement is narrow. One place per customer, one thread per job, with dates attached automatically rather than typed by somebody later. Automatic dating matters more than it sounds: a timestamp the system wrote is harder to dispute than one a person entered, and it does not get forgotten when the day is busy.
The test for whether you have this is the same one as always, and you can run it this afternoon. Pick a job from two years ago. Try to produce, in five minutes, the signed scope, the before photographs, every change that was agreed, and the date of completion.
If you can, a dispute on that job is an inconvenience. If you cannot, it is a negotiation about who sounds more credible, and that is a coin flip you are paying a lawyer to call.