Change Orders, and the Gate That Stops You Invoicing Without Them

Every platform has change orders. The question worth asking a salesperson is what their software does when a change has been priced but not approved and somebody tries to bill the job anyway. Most of them let you.

What you actually do

1. 1
   Price the changeOn the job, as an amount or as rows. The crew’s own report of the problem can be carried straight into it.
2. 2
   Send it for approvalOnline for a signature, or record the approval if the builder would rather call you.
3. 3
   Chase it if it goes quietThe board tracks how long each one has been waiting and offers the reminder.
4. 4
   Apply itApproved money goes onto the job’s total. Until you apply it, the job is still worth what it was sold for.
5. 5
   Now you can billThe hold lifts on its own once nothing on the job is unresolved.

The board

Change orders sit in the lane they are really in: needs sending, sent and not opened, opened and not decided, approved and waiting to be applied, or declined and needing a new price.

Each row wears one labeled button for the next thing to do to it: Send to customer, Send reminder, Apply to job, Record approval. The same decision drives every screen, so the job page and this board can never disagree about what a change needs next.

The gate

A job with a change order on it that has not been applied cannot move into the billing stages. It is not a warning you can click past and it is not a setting somebody can switch off. The software refuses the move, the database refuses it underneath that, and the job reads as held on every board until somebody deals with it.

This is the most valuable rule in the product, and it is worth being blunt about why.

The mistake it prevents is invisible on the day it happens. Billing a job that grew looks completely normal: the invoice goes out, it matches the contract, nobody blinks. It gets expensive six weeks later, when somebody remembers the change, the builder has already closed the job out, and the money is now a favor you are asking for instead of an invoice you are sending. Every contractor reading this has eaten one. The gate is the software refusing to let you do it in the first place.

Why you cannot forget to do it

The hold is not a switch somebody flips. Writing the change order is what closes the gate: the job reads its own changes and holds itself.

That matters, because the version of this that fails is the one that needs a person to remember. A checkbox on the job, a note in the file, a flag somebody sets: every one of those has a gap between the change existing and the job knowing about it, and that gap is exactly where the money goes.

It lifts on its own too, and only once everything is settled. A job with two changes on it stays held until the last one is applied. Applying one of two is not the job being resolved, because a total that is only half agreed is still not the number to bill.

The total is added up, not typed

A job’s total is what it was sold for plus every change that has been applied. It is added up. Nobody types a contract total anywhere, on any screen.

The gate stops the timing mistake: billing before the change was settled. This stops the other one. A total that gets re-typed into an invoice, a spreadsheet and an accounting system is a total that will eventually differ in one of the three, and the copy the customer gets is the one that is wrong.

Every document reads that same number. The invoice, the statement, the AR report and the margin on the job are all looking at one figure, so they cannot tell you three different things about one job.

Your accounting system refuses it too

If you sync with QuickBooks, a job whose total is not final is turned away there as well, and told why. Nothing reaches your books at the amount the job was originally sold for.

That is deliberate. The worst version of this mistake is not one wrong invoice. It is a wrong invoice that reached your accountant, got reconciled, and now has to be fixed in two systems by two people who each think the other one is right.

How much is being held

Held work is a number on the boards rather than a surprise at the end of the month. The operations board and each rep’s own production page show what is held and what it adds up to in dollars.

That figure is worth watching for a reason that has nothing to do with software. If a lot of your finished work is sitting held, the gate is not the problem. It is showing you one.

What the gate will not do

A change order belongs to a job that has not been billed yet, so you cannot add one to a job that is already invoiced. Extra work you find after the invoice went out is a second invoice, or a credit against the first.

That is on purpose rather than something missing. The gate exists so a job’s total is settled before anybody bills it, and letting a change move a total the customer is already holding paperwork for would undo the thing it is there to protect.

Getting the customer to approve it

A change order can be sent for online signature the same way a bid is. The page shows three numbers instead of one: what the contract was, what this change adds, and what the contract becomes.

That third number is the one the person approving actually cares about. Leaving it off is why so many change orders come back with "okay, so what does that make the total?", which is another day gone, on a job the crew is standing on.

A "no" is handled properly too. A customer who declines in writing blocks the change from being applied at all until somebody reprices it and reopens it, and the refusal stays on the record afterward. You can see what they turned down and when.

Every screen on this page is the software running, captured from a demo workspace. The builders, addresses and contacts in it are invented; the plan is one we drew. More at Opulence Built.