I suspect that you simply were a couple of minutes too early to collect them, could as well have been seconds. The time itself has not changed, but when you try to collect them at, for example, 9.14 one day and at 9.13 the next day, the Puppy wn't be ready yet. (I do not have any logs for collecting water points from puppys, so I cannot verify this. I guess starkad could)

I think the whole collecting system is not ideal and I would prefer the option to see the exclamation mark before entering room editing mode and possibly some kind of notification when the item is ready to collect event currency. I already requested this to starkad a long time ago, but, like always, he is not really having enough time to take care of this. It's on his super-long to-do list, but with his rare free time it can take years for him to finish something.

I forget to click on them until late in day,
I hit few minutes to midnight the other day haha

If they auto refreshed like knuffels do for digging / troth tokens mabeh that would help a little?
The code might be easier to create that way... if it kinda already exists? (I know it still take editing just may be easier)