Service Change orders + T&M
Change orders and T&M tags
The work was done. Somebody authorized it. Seven weeks later you are still arguing about whether it was documented well enough to be worth what it cost you.
Dodge Construction Network research on specialty trade contractors. Their numbers, not ours. We have no survey and are not going to invent one.
The cycle
It fails in the same order every time.
- 01
Work happens before the paper does
A foreman is told to proceed. The tag gets written that evening, or the next morning from memory, or not at all until somebody notices the hours.
- 02
Documentation is thin
No photographs, no signature, a description a GC can argue with. Industry research puts internal processing alone at around 22 days before it even reaches the GC.
- 03
The GC has questions
Which becomes a revision request, which becomes a delay. GC approval averages another 26 days on top of your own.
- 04
It gets negotiated down
More than half of GCs say they do not pay the full requested amount on over a fifth of the change orders they handle. By then the work is months old and your position has decayed.
- 05
Or it becomes bad debt
Performed, billed, never recovered. Three in four specialty contractors have done this. It rarely shows up as a loss anyone investigates, because it never looked like a project failure.
Note where the leverage is. Roughly 22 of those days are yours. That half is documentation quality, and it is also what causes most of the GC’s half, thin descriptions and missing signatures are what generate the questions you then wait a month to resolve.
What we build
A tag that leaves site complete.
- Capture on site
- The tag is written where the work happens, on a phone, with photographs and a signature captured on glass. Works with no signal and syncs later.
- Priced against the contract
- Labor, equipment and material priced from your own rate schedule, with markup applied by the rules in the agreement rather than from memory.
- Submitted the same day
- Formatted the way the GC wants it, sent while the work is fresh and the superintendent still remembers authorizing it.
- Tracked until someone decides
- An ageing log of every outstanding tag, who has it, and how long they have had it. The number that makes a conversation with a GC short.
- Fed to your accounting system
- Approved work lands where your billing already lives, instead of being retyped into it.
Questions
What is a T&M tag?
A time and materials tag, also called a T&M ticket, extra work order or field ticket depending on the trade, is the document recording labor, equipment and materials for work performed outside the original contract scope. It is the evidence that the work happened and that someone authorized it, and it is the basis for the change order that follows.
Why do change orders take so long to get approved?
Industry research puts the full cycle at close to seven weeks: roughly 22 days of internal processing before submission, then around 26 days waiting on the general contractor. The internal half is the part you control, and it is mostly documentation quality, thin descriptions and missing signatures generate the GC questions that cause most of the second half.
We already use Procore. Why would we need anything else?
Procore is the general contractor’s system, and you are a participant in it. It does not price a tag against your own rate schedule, it does not follow you to the next GC who runs something different, and it does not connect to the accounting system where your billing actually lives. We build the layer that does, underneath whatever platforms your customers require.
What about Clearstory or similar change order tools?
They are good products and if one fits your business you should buy it. We would rather tell you that than sell you something. The reason companies come to us is usually that the product does not fit: an unusual approval chain, an accounting system with no integration, several GCs on several platforms, or a field crew that abandoned the last rollout. Custom is not better by default. It is better when the product does not fit.
Our crews stopped using the last app we bought. Why is this different?
It might not be, and that is the risk worth talking about first. Forty-seven percent of contractors say adoption is their hardest technology problem, ahead of cost and integration. We design for the person in the field before we design for the office, we run a field trial in week four while the old process is still running, and we measure whether people actually use it rather than whether it works.
How long does it take and what does it cost?
Six weeks for a single workflow at a fixed price between $60,000 and $90,000. Before that, a Workflow Audit, one week, $7,500, which produces a working prototype on your own documents and replaces that range with one number.
See a build run end to end.
A complete worked example, the before state, what got built, the arithmetic, and the four things that went wrong.