Reconstructed vs Contemporaneous Logs: Why the Difference Decides It

What “contemporaneous” actually buys you

A record made at or near the time of the work is credible because it could not have been shaped by knowing the outcome. A record assembled later, once you know exactly how many hours you need, invites the obvious question — and answering it is uncomfortable even when you are being honest.

This is why the gap between when work was done and when it was recorded is worth capturing explicitly. A log that shows an entry made the same evening is a materially different document from one showing four hundred entries created on a single day in April.

What makes a reconstruction weak

Reconstructions are not automatically worthless, but they fail in predictable ways:

• Uniform durations — page after page of 2.0 and 3.0 hours.
• Generic descriptions that could describe any day of the year.
• Totals that land suspiciously just above a threshold.
• No supporting evidence: no receipts, messages, photos, or invoices to corroborate any of it.
• No record of anyone else’s hours, so the comparison cannot be tested.

If a reconstruction is all you have

It happens, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. If you are rebuilding a past year, be conservative and be transparent: tie every entry you can to something independent — booking dates, message timestamps, receipts, bank records, photo metadata, hardware-store trips. Vary the durations because real work varies. Leave out anything you genuinely cannot support.

And be explicit with your CPA that it is a reconstruction. They can only advise on the strength of a position they understand accurately, and they are the right person to decide how much weight it bears.

The fix is boring and it works

Log as you go. Two minutes at the end of a task beats two days in April and produces a document that is worth something. STR Tracker records both the date the work happened and the date you entered it, so the contemporaneity is on the record rather than being something you have to assert.