The Variation Nobody Wrote Down

"While you're here, could you just…" The work gets done. It gets done because saying no on site is awkward and because it is twenty minutes. Nobody writes it down. Six weeks later it is in the final account as a line the client does not recognise, and you are arguing about twenty minutes from March.

An instruction is not an agreed price

These are two separate events and most jobs collapse them into one. The client says do it; you do it; everyone assumes the money follows. It does not follow. At the final account you are asked what it was worth, and the answer is whatever you can evidence, not whatever it cost you.

So a variation needs both halves recorded, and it needs them recorded before the work happens:

• The instruction, who asked, when, and for exactly what. In writing. A WhatsApp message is written; a phone call is not.
• The value. The sum, or the basis on which it will be valued: measured against the contract rates, a star rate for something the contract does not cover, or dayworks against recorded time and plant.

Half a record is a worse position than no record, because it proves the work was asked for without proving what it was worth. That is the argument the paying party would rather have.

Where it actually breaks

Not at the big variations. A structural change gets an email because everyone can see it is a structural change. The record breaks on the small ones, and it breaks in four predictable places:

1. The client speaks to the wrong person. They ask the joiner on site rather than the person who prices. The joiner is being helpful. The office never hears about it.
2. The instruction is verbal and the confirmation never gets sent. You mean to write it up that evening. You are on another site that evening.
3. The value is left until later. "Sort it out at the end" is agreed by both parties in good faith and is the sentence that produces final account disputes.
4. The variation is done as part of something else. The extra socket goes in while the sparks is second-fixing the room. No separate day, no separate line, no separate anything.

What a usable variation record contains

Not a form for the sake of a form. These are the fields that get asked for when it is contested:

• A reference and a date. The date of the instruction, not the date you wrote it up
• Who instructed it, by name and role
• What was asked for, described the way the works are described in the contract documents
• The valuation basis, and the figure if there is one
• The effect on the programme, in days, including nil where the answer is nil
• Whatever it changes in the original scope, additions, omissions, substitutions
• Confirmation from the other side, or a record that confirmation was sought and by when it was needed

The programme line matters more than it looks. A variation priced correctly and given no time is still a loss, and it is the half of a claim contractors most often leave out.

Price it while you are still standing in the room

The longer the gap between the request and the number, the more the client assumes the answer is nothing. That is not bad faith on their part; silence reads as "included" to anybody who is not in the trade.

This is the practical case for pricing from a rate book rather than from memory. If your day rates and your material prices are already in one place, a variation is a lookup rather than an evening's work, and it can go back the same day with the same authority as the original quote.

What BuiltUp does with this, and what it does not

Clients raise change requests from the project portal. You approve, add costs and new line items, merge them into the scope, or reject with a reason, and either way there is a dated record of the request and what happened to it. When you seal an evidence pack, the pack reports variations that were instructed with no agreed value, because knowing that in July is useful and knowing it in adjudication is not.

What it does not do is stop a client asking your joiner for a favour. Nothing does. The system's job is to make writing it down take ten seconds rather than an evening, on the principle that a record that is inconvenient does not get kept.

The figure we are not going to give you

You will find plenty of pages telling you what scope creep costs the average contractor per year. This one had a figure on it too, until we went looking for where it came from and found that it came from nowhere. So there is no number here.

You already have the only figure that matters, and it is on your own final accounts: the difference between what you priced and what you were paid, on the last five jobs. Nobody else's average tells you anything about yours.