By Artem Korsakov ·
Additional work almost always arises at an inconvenient moment. The crew is on-site, the client asks to reinforce the foundation for equipment, and the foreman understands that work cannot proceed further without it. The fastest path seems to be: buy materials, perform the work, then issue an invoice. It is precisely this path that leads to disputes: the client does not remember agreeing, or believes the work was included in the contract.
Let's examine a procedure where additional work is approved before procurement, without stopping the site for long.
Why "We'll do it, then approve" doesn't work
When the work is already done, the contractor has no negotiating leverage. The client can dispute the volume, price, or even the necessity of the work. Materials are purchased, people have worked, money is spent. Even if the client eventually pays, the discussion will take up management time and damage relationships.
There is also an internal aspect. If procurement purchases based on verbal agreements, the company has no basis for these expenses in project accounting. A month later, it is difficult to understand where the money went and who authorized it.
What must be in the request
The additional work request must be understandable to the client without a call to the foreman. The minimum composition:
- reason: what was discovered and why work cannot continue without it;
- items with units and volumes: meters, pieces, cubic meters;
- price per unit and total for the client;
- impact on schedule for each item;
- consequences if the client refuses: what risks and options exist.
Internal costs and margin are not included in the request for the client. These are different documents, although they are calculated from the same base items.
In construction cost management systems, changes are documented as separate documents with their own approval process. For example, Autodesk documentation describes a procedure for working with change orders, where a change receives a status and only then affects the cost. Your status names may differ, but the principle should be preserved.
Partial Approval
Clients rarely answer "yes" or "no" to the entire request. More often, they agree to part of it: we will reinforce the foundation, but postpone moving the cable route. The procedure must support this.
For this, the request consists of items, and the client decides on each one. You can approve the full volume of an item, a portion of it, or zero. Unit items are approved only in whole numbers. For partial approval or refusal, the client writes a comment; otherwise, no one will remember the reason a month later.
After approval, the cost and schedule impact are recalculated based on approved volumes. This recalculation must be visible to the client before they confirm their decision.
Подпись: Training request. Decisions are made on each item, and procurement starts only after the change is applied to the budget.
Deferred items must not be lost. If the client says "later," the item remains in the request history with their comment. When the issue returns, a new request is created with current prices and schedules. Prices may have changed within a month, and consent to the previous amount no longer matters.
Apply Once
An approved change alters the project budget and schedule. This action must be executed exactly once and leave a trace: who applied it, when, based on which decision. If a change is applied twice, the project budget will diverge from reality, and finding the error will be difficult.
Changes are usually applied by finance or project managers: responsibility for the budget lies with them. After application, procurement receives the basis for purchasing.
It is useful to separate two moments: client decision and application to the budget. There may be a time gap between them, for example, if finance verifies related costs. Until the change is applied, the project budget shows previous figures, and the request remains in the status "approved, awaiting application."
Link to Procurement and Accounting
Procurement and cost accounting are often conducted in an accounting system, such as 1C (a Russian accounting and ERP platform) for production management or another configuration. The change approval system does not need to replace them. It is sufficient for it to pass approved items to accounting and receive actual costs back. How to arrange this transfer and who will initiate procurement is decided during implementation.
Checklist Before Sending the Request
Before sending an additional work request to the client, check:
- Is there a reason understandable to someone who was not on-site?
- Is the request broken down into items for which a separate decision can be made?
- Does each item have a unit, volume, price, and schedule impact?
- Have related works affected by the change been verified?
- Is the material delivery timeline known after approval?
- Does procurement know that purchasing is not allowed before decision?
If the answer to the sixth question is "no," the other points are useless: materials will end up on-site before the client's decision.
To keep the site from standing still, agree with the client on a response deadline for the request. It is better to fix this timeframe in the contract or meeting minutes. Then the foreman knows when to expect a decision, and the client understands that delaying the response shifts the schedule.
In the demo scenario, you can trace the general chain: request, items, partial approval by the client, and application of the change to the budget once, with a prohibition on repeated application.
Related article: How to link estimates, procurement, and actual costs while maintaining existing 1C.
Sources and Example Boundaries
Sources confirm the described functions of ready-made products, not demand or profitability of custom development. Scenarios and amounts are educational. Demonstrations work with fictional data; real integrations, AI, payments, and external publication are not connected in them.