Change orders
Change order software that gets the change approved before it is built
Report it from the field, price it the same day, send it for signature, and let a hard gate stop anyone invoicing a job with a change still hanging over it.
Change-order money is not lost in a negotiation
It is lost because the work got built before anybody wrote it down. The crew is paid to keep moving, so they keep moving; by the time a number reaches the office the job is closed and the builder has moved on.
That is a sequencing problem, not a negotiating problem, and sequencing problems have fixes.
What you get
What it does
Reported by whoever sees it
The crew standing on the problem files it from their phone: a photo and two sentences. They are not asked to price it or decide anything, only to make the office aware while the work is still undone.
Priced into a real document
Write it as a lump sum or as line items off your own product catalogue. The customer sees the contract amount before, the change, and the amount after, which is the number they actually care about.
Signed online, or recorded honestly
Send a link the customer signs in a minute, or record the phone approval you already got with who said it and when. Both are evidence; the second is labelled as an approval your office recorded, never shown as a signature.
A money gate, not a reminder
A job cannot enter invoicing while a change order on it is pending. The transition is refused in the database, and the job reads as held for a pending change order on every board until it is resolved.
The total is added up, never typed
A job's total is what it was sold for plus every change that has been approved, reassembled the moment one is applied. Nobody re-keys a contract sum, so the figure on the invoice cannot be somebody's typing mistake.
Your two sets of books cannot disagree
QuickBooks will not take a job whose total is not final either. It is refused with the reason given, instead of quietly receiving the pre-change amount and leaving your accountant and your job file describing one job two different ways.
A refusal is first class
A customer who declines in writing blocks the change from being applied, and the refusal survives in the record after you reprice and re-send.
A board of what is unresolved
Priced but not sent, sent but not answered, approved but not applied, declined and needing a reprice, with days waiting counted from the send.
How it works
Start to finish
- 1
The field reports it
From the job on their phone, the moment they see it, with a photo.
- 2
The office prices it
Same day. A price that lands while the builder remembers the conversation gets approved; one that lands in three weeks gets argued about.
- 3
It goes to whoever signs
The recipient is resolved from the account rather than typed: the estimating contact who approves a price, not the AP address that receives invoices.
- 4
Approval comes back and is applied
Applying moves the contract sum in exactly one place. Every downstream document reads from it.
- 5
Only then can the job be invoiced
Not a convention. The state machine refuses the transition.
How approvals actually work here
Not every contractor wants a customer-facing signing link, so the approval path is a company setting and the default is manual: no link exists anywhere until an administrator turns digital approvals on. In manual mode the office records the approval it already has (by phone, in person, by email or on paper) stamped with who recorded it and when, which is the difference between testimony and hearsay.
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Turn digital approvals on and the customer gets a page showing the arithmetic and signs it. Switching back to manual kills links already sitting in inboxes, because the mode is re-read on every request rather than checked when the link was minted.
A signature is authorisation, not application. Nothing about signing moves the contract value: the office still applies the change, deliberately, and the gate stays closed until they do.
Nothing has to be remembered for the hold to happen, either. Writing the change order is what closes the gate: the job reads its own change orders and holds itself. There is no second step to forget, and no window in which a change exists and the job does not know about it.
It lifts on its own, once. A job carrying two changes stays held until the last one is resolved. Applying one of two is not the job being settled, and a total that is only partly agreed is still not the number to bill.
Common questions
- Record it. You capture who approved, how (phone, in person, email, paper) and the date, and the system stamps who in your office recorded it. It is shown as an approval your office recorded, never dressed up as a customer signature.
See it on your own jobs.
A 20-minute walkthrough, on your real pipeline. No slide deck, no pressure.
Keep reading
- GuideThe change order processA process that survives a real week, and the five things that turn into unpaid work.Read
- SolutionJob costingWhat the extra work actually cost, against what you charged for it.Read
- Case studyWhy the gate existsThe jobs that went wrong first, and what got built in response.Read