How to document a dispute

01

The rule under all of it: two dates on everything

Every entry in a record has two dates. The day it happened, and the day you wrote it down. When those two dates are close together, the entry is worth a lot. When they're months apart, it's a memory.

Anyone can sit down after a dispute starts and type a neat list of dates. What a stranger can't easily dismiss is a record that shows each line was written while things were still happening. That's the whole idea. Everything else on this page is how to get there.

02

Start today, even if it started months ago

The best day to start the record was the first day. The next best is today. Here's the first hour.

1. 01
   Give it a name you'll recognize.

   "Deposit, Elm Street apartment" or "Roof job, Tomlin Builders". One dispute, one record.
2. 02
   Write down what happened most recently, today.

   The latest thing is the freshest. Date it, say what happened, and stop. You'll get to the rest.
3. 03
   Gather what you already have before it disappears.

   Screenshots, the text thread, the emails, the quote, the receipts. Group chats get left and deleted. Get them now.
4. 04
   Work backwards from the start, and label it as looking back.

   Anything you write today about something from March is a reconstruction. Say so on the entry. That honesty protects everything else in the file.
5. 05
   From now on, write each thing down the day it happens.

   Two lines on the walk back to the car is enough. This is the habit that makes the record count.

03

What to keep, and the mistake people make with each

Keep anything that shows what happened, when, and who was involved. These six cover almost every dispute.

04

How to write an entry that holds its weight

A good entry is short, specific and dated twice. It says what happened, not how it felt. The feeling is real. It just isn't the record, and a record that reads as frustration reads as one side of an argument.

05

Log the silence

The most common complaint in almost every dispute is a stretch where nothing happened: nobody came, nobody replied, the money didn't arrive. It's also the least documented part, because while it's happening it doesn't feel like anything worth writing down.

A week of nothing is still an entry. "Called, no answer, 4:15pm" is enough. And every time you ask for something in writing, the clock starts from that date. If you've written down when you asked, the gap until the answer counts itself.

06

When it's being raised against you

Most advice about documenting assumes you're the one complaining. But every dispute has someone answering it, and that person usually starts with nothing written down, because until the claim arrived there was nothing to answer.

The record is the same shape either way. What changes is who's answering whom, and in a record that's a label, not a different set of facts.

07

Where records usually go wrong

These come from working through ordinary disputes one entry at a time. None of them is dramatic. Each one is avoidable.

1. 01
   The phone call nobody wrote down

   Two lines afterwards would have covered it. Without them, it's one person's memory against another's.
   → Case 004
2. 02
   The agreement made in a group chat

   A change agreed in a chat about something else, and never screenshotted or exported. Chats scroll, get muted and get deleted.
   → Case 003
3. 03
   Weeks of silence with nothing in them

   The part that upset someone most, and the part they'd written nothing about.
   → Case 003
4. 04
   Recording the wrong thing

   Days were logged when the dispute was about hours. Log what's actually in question.
   → Case 002
5. 05
   A memory dressed up as a note

   Something written much later, mixed in without saying so. Label a reconstruction as one, and the rest of the file stays trusted.
   → Case 002
6. 06
   Three visits that look like three separate problems

   Each one got its own job number. Written down together, in date order, they become one continuing problem.
   → Case 001

09

See it done: worked examples

Ordinary disputes over ordinary amounts, pulled apart one entry at a time. What was kept, what each entry did, what was missing, and how it ended. Made-up people and made-up amounts; the way the records are built is the real part.

• 004A withheld deposit, from the landlord's side
  $1,450 held back on a $2,000 deposit. One side had photo pairs twenty-one months apart; the other had a recollection.
  Answering
• 003A bathroom that stopped halfway
  $6,200 paid, three weeks of nothing. The record that mattered turned out to be the group chat nobody thought to save.
  Raising it
• 002Accused of the noise, from the other side of the fence
  Seven complaints over four months. What the accused neighbor had was a work calendar, and it did more than he expected.
  Answering
• 001A phone that came back three times
  $340 repair, same fault each time. Nine items over six weeks, and the whole thing rested on keeping the job numbers.
  Raising it

The words that come up in these, like contemporaneous note, variation or condition report, are explained on Plain English. Checklists for repairs, neighbors and work on your home sit under "What to write down".

10

Questions people ask

Where BuildMyEvidence fits

You can do all of this with a notebook and a folder

Everything above works on paper. BuildMyEvidence does the same job in one place: every entry keeps both of its dates, and the date you wrote it down can't be changed afterwards, by you or by us. Files are fingerprinted when they arrive, silences are counted from the dates on either side, and at the end it builds the one document you hand over.

It works the same way whichever side you're on. It doesn't say who's right, doesn't give legal advice and doesn't write anything you didn't.

How we write these

About this guide

This guide is written and reviewed by the BuildMyEvidence editorial team. It's about keeping a record, never about who's right or what anyone is owed. It doesn't name laws or deadlines, because those change from state to state. The worked examples use made-up people and amounts. When something here changes, the reviewed date at the top changes with it.