Asking good questions

Start a question from New chat, or from the composer at the top of a project page. Astruct answers from the project’s contract, documents and mail, and shows where each point came from.

Choose the project

Answers come from one project’s documents. The composer has a project picker. If you ask without choosing one, Astruct asks which project you mean. Choose All projects only when you want to search across every project, for example which of our jobs have a payment claim due this week?

Be specific about the event

Name the thing you are asking about, the way it is referred to on the job.

• Less useful: Is this a variation?
• More useful: SI-014 says “no change to the subcontract sum”. Do we still need to give a variation notice, and by when?

References such as SI numbers, RFI numbers, drawing revisions and dates help Astruct find the right documents.

Ask about the contract you actually have

Astruct knows how Australian contracts work, including AS 2124, AS 4000, AS 4300, AS 4902 and AS 4903 style head contracts and subcontracts, and security of payment law such as SOPA and Queensland’s BIF Act. But the answer comes from your contract. Where special conditions replace a general condition, Astruct uses the special condition, and says so.

Good questions to try

• What notice do we need to give for a delay, and what has to be in it?
• Summarise the correspondence about the L6 slab edge handover.
• What did the head contractor say about the crane outage, and when?
• When is the payment schedule for our last payment claim due?
• What is the scope of our subcontract for brackets and anchors?

Check the source

Every point in an answer carries a reference to its document and page. Open it before relying on an answer for anything that matters. See Page references.