The email you did not save is the one that costs you millions

A commercial manager once told us a story that still makes my stomach turn.

Eighteen months into a major project, she was in a claims meeting with the client.
Everyone knew there had been an instruction to change scope.
Everyone remembered the conversation.
Everyone was sure an email had gone out.

No one could find it.

It was not in the contract admin’s inbox.
It was not in the project manager’s inbox.
It was not in the shared folder.

Somewhere between “I’ll send that later” and “I am sure someone else has it” the message disappeared.

The claim was weaker.
The negotiation dragged.
The project team walked out knowing they had done the work but could not prove it in the way the contract required.

That is the tax of missing data.
You pay it slowly over the life of a project and you only see the bill at the end.

Everyone wants the perfect system on day one

When we roll Hevi into a new project, we hear a version of the same sentence.

“I want to start this fresh on a new job, from day one, with everything clean and mapped out.”

In a perfect world that makes sense.
You would kick off a new project.
Upload the contract.
Map every workflow.
Switch on the mailbox.
Train the team.
Run the whole job with a beautiful digital paper trail.

The reality is very different.

Most projects we see are already running.
They have months or years of history.
The contract register lives in an Excel file on someone’s desktop.
Variations exist in emails, meeting minutes and a few half finished logs.
Different people are holding different parts of the truth.

So teams sit in this uncomfortable middle ground.
They want a system.
They want better visibility.
But they feel they cannot move until they have “cleaned up” the data first.

They are waiting for the perfect starting point that never arrives.

The first habit is not configuration. The first habit is capture.

In the transcript, our customer said something that cut right to the heart of this.

They were talking about the project inbox we set up with teams.
A simple idea.
Every contract related email gets BCC’d or sent to a dedicated address.
Hevi reads the traffic, flags variations and deadlines, and builds cases from the noise.

The reflex reaction we see in nearly every team is the same.

People assume the inbox should only receive “important” messages.
They worry it will get flooded.
They try to decide up front what is worth sending.

That is the old mental model.

In the old world, more data meant more work.
If you copied the project inbox on every message you created a monster spreadsheet or document archive that someone had to maintain.
You were right to be picky.

The new world works differently.

The cost of capturing an email is basically zero.
The cost of missing an email can be millions.

As we told this customer on the call:

You do not pay a penalty for sending too much.
You pay a penalty for what you never send.

So our advice is simple.

Treat the project inbox as a net, not a funnel.
Let it catch everything.
Trust the system to surface the signal.

You can always archive what you do not need.
You cannot resurrect what never went in.

“We threw thousands of old emails at it just to see what we had missed”

One of the most interesting ways customers test Hevi is with historical projects.

They take a job where everyone already knows the outcome.
Maybe the margin got chewed up.
Maybe a few key variations were never fully recovered.
You can feel the scars in the way the commercial team talks about it.

Then they do something that would have sounded insane a few years ago.

They export every project email.
Hundreds.
Sometimes thousands.
And they push them all through the project inbox.

No manual triage.
No careful curation.
No “I will only send the important ones.”

Just everything.

Then they sit back and watch what the system flags.

We have seen Hevi surface notices that were never followed up.
Early warning signs that never became formal claims.
Delay events that were mentioned in passing but never tracked against time bars.

Sometimes the team looks at the screen and laughs.
Sometimes they wince.

Because the platform is not doing anything magical.
It is simply reading what they already had and asking:

“Are you sure you do not want to do something about this?”

That is the point.

The value was never in writing a perfect variation register.
The value was in not losing the breadcrumbs in the first place.

You do not know which email will matter yet

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

You cannot tell, in the moment, which email will matter twelve months from now.

The polite “thanks, received” from the client may become your evidence that they saw the notice within the required period.
The one line note from site about a change in access might be the hinge point in a delay claim.
The casual “we will sort the paperwork later” from a superintendent might be the difference between a valid instruction and an expensive argument.

On day thirty of a job it all feels like noise.
On day seven hundred it becomes the history of the project.

So instead of trying to be a human filter, your job becomes much simpler.

Make sure every conversation that could possibly be contractual touches the inbox.

Let the machine do what it does best.
Read everything.
Tag patterns.
Connect the dots between documents, dates and obligations.

Your team should be spending their energy on judgment and strategy, not on deciding which email is worth saving.

The small habit that changes everything

This is why, when customers ask us, “Where do we start?” we do not talk about dashboards.

We talk about habits.

Specifically, one habit.

Every time you send or receive something that might be contractual, include the project inbox.

BCC it.
Add it to the distribution list.
Forward it in later if you have to.

That is it.

Once that data lives in one place, you can build everything else.

Workflows.
Cases.
Task lists.
Training courses.
Dashboards.

The system can extract the clauses, track the dates and nudge the right person at the right time.

But none of that matters if the email never arrives.

From scattered files to a single source of truth

Ask any commercial manager where their contract lives and you will usually get a sigh.

A bit of Excel.
A bit of SharePoint.
A bit on the desktop.
A bit in someone’s mailbox who left the project six months ago.

Software will not fix that by itself.

What fixes it is a shared understanding that there is one place where the record lives.
One project inbox.
One case or register.
One spot where anyone in the team can see the story of the job.

The technology makes it possible.
The habit makes it real.

When a team commits to “everything into the inbox” the dynamic changes.

You no longer have to chase five people for the history of a claim.
You no longer rely on someone’s memory of a conversation in a carpark.
You have a line by line record of what was said, when it was said, and what the contract requires.

That is the difference between hoping you can defend your position and knowing you can.

The real hot take

If there is one lesson we wish every project team would take away, it is this.

Your inbox is already your risk register.
You are just not treating it that way.

Stop trying to decide what deserves to be captured.
Stop waiting for the clean greenfield project where you can start “properly”.

Start today.
On the messy job you are already running.

Create the project inbox.
Send it everything.
Let the system tell you what matters.

Because the email you did not save will always be the one you wish you had.

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