What is change order request?
A change order request, or COR, is a formal submission asking a general contractor or owner to approve a change in contract scope and price. It becomes a change order only once signed, and until then the work sits on your books as unbilled cost.
What it has to contain
A request that gets approved on the first pass generally carries all of these:
- A description specific enough that somebody who was not there can evaluate it
- The direction or condition that caused the change, with a date and a name
- Labor, equipment and material broken out, priced against the governing rate schedule
- Photographs of the condition
- Any schedule impact
- A reference to the daily report or T&M tag underneath it
Missing any one of these is the usual cause of a revision cycle, and each cycle costs roughly a week.
Why approval takes so long
Dodge Construction Network research on specialty trade contractors puts the full cycle near seven weeks: about 22 days of internal processing before submission, then around 26 days waiting on the general contractor.
The internal half is the part a contractor controls, and it drives much of the second half. Thin documentation generates the questions that turn one review into three.
What happens while it is outstanding
Work performed against an unsigned request is cost with no matching contract value. It sits as underbilling on the WIP schedule, and if the balance grows large enough it starts affecting how a surety reads the business.
More than half of general contractors report not paying the full requested amount on over a fifth of the change orders they handle, so the amount eventually approved is frequently less than the amount submitted. The gap between the two is decided almost entirely by documentation quality.
Going deeper: Change orders and T&M tags