Ask a contractor how much unbilled extra work is sitting on their jobs right now and you will usually get a shrug. Ask how much they wrote off last year and you get a smaller number than the truth.
The short answer: track work performed without a signed change order as a weekly number, aged by how long it has been sitting. Past fourteen days you are unlikely to collect. The conversation fades, the customer has formed a view of what the job costs, and asking for money starts to feel like a dispute rather than an invoice.
This is not a paperwork problem. It is a process problem, and it happens for reasons that are entirely human.
Why it happens
Nobody sets out to work for free. The sequence is always the same.
The customer is standing there. They ask for something small — move that, add this, while you're up there could you. It is genuinely small. Saying no feels petty, and the crew is not paid to have pricing conversations.
So somebody says yes. It takes four hours.
Four hours at a burdened rate plus overhead is roughly $400. Nobody wrote it down. The foreman mentioned it to you in passing eleven days later, by which point the job is nearly finished and raising it now would sour a relationship that has otherwise gone well.
That is how it goes. Not one big giveaway — twenty small ones.
Across forty jobs a year, four hours each, you have given away 160 hours. At a burdened labour cost of $50 plus $48 of overhead, that is $15,680 of margin that simply evaporated, and it will never appear as a line item anywhere.
The fourteen-day rule
Change orders have a shelf life, and it is shorter than people think.
Inside a few days, the conversation is fresh. The customer remembers asking. Producing a change order feels like good administration.
After two weeks, the memory has softened. The customer remembers a chat, not a request. They have anchored on the contract price. Now your invoice looks like a surprise, and surprises damage trust even when they are entirely fair.
After a month, you are negotiating rather than invoicing, and you will usually take less than the work was worth to keep the relationship intact.
So track it aged:
| Age | Realistic collection |
|---|---|
| 0–7 days | High |
| 8–14 days | Good |
| 15–30 days | Difficult |
| 30+ days | Assume you are writing it off |
That table is why "unapproved extras sitting in the field, anything older than 14 days" belongs on a weekly review. Not because fourteen is magic, but because it is roughly where collectible becomes contentious.
Make approval take two minutes
The reason crews do not raise change orders is that the process is too slow for the moment it needs to happen in. A customer asks a question, and the honest answer requires a form, a price, and an office.
So the crew says yes, because saying yes takes four seconds.
Fix the speed, not the discipline.
A workable field process looks like this:
- Crew member photographs the thing being asked for
- Texts it to the office or foreman with one line: "Customer wants X on Job 4412"
- Office prices it from a rate card and replies with a number
- Crew shows the customer the number and asks for a yes by text
- A yes by text is the approval
That is two minutes. No form, no signature, no site visit. A text saying "yes go ahead" is a real record and it holds up perfectly well in the situations that matter.
The rate card is what makes this fast. A short list of common extras with prices means the office can answer immediately instead of building an estimate.
The rule the crew needs
Every crew member needs one sentence they can say without feeling awkward, and it needs to be permission from you rather than judgment from them.
Something like: "Happy to do that — it's outside what we quoted so I'll get you a price before we start."
That is not a refusal. It is not confrontational. It makes the extra normal rather than a negotiation. And crucially, it takes the pricing decision out of the hands of someone standing on a roof who just wants to be helpful.
Say clearly and repeatedly that nobody gets in trouble for asking. The instinct to be accommodating is a good instinct. It just needs a channel.
Track it as a number
Everything that gets measured gets managed, and this is measurable.
One line per job: value of work performed with no signed approval, and how many days it has been outstanding.
Review it weekly. Anything over seven days gets a call that day. Anything over fourteen gets a decision — chase it, or write it off deliberately rather than by neglect.
Writing it off on purpose is a legitimate choice. Sometimes the relationship is worth more than $400. The difference is that a deliberate write-off is a decision with a reason, and a drifted write-off is just money leaving.
Where this shows up in the numbers
Unbilled extras almost never appear as a distinct problem. They disguise themselves as something else.
Labour overruns. Hours came in over on a job and nobody could say why. Some of those hours were work the customer asked for and never paid for.
Margin erosion. A job type consistently runs four or five points under bid. Part of that gap is scope that grew and pricing that did not.
Crew frustration. People notice when work keeps expanding without acknowledgement, even if they cannot articulate it that way.
Which means fixing the change order process usually improves three numbers at once, and only one of them is the obvious one.
What good looks like
A business that handles this well is not one with more paperwork. It is one where:
- The crew has explicit permission to say "I'll get you a price"
- Pricing a small extra takes minutes, not a day
- A text approval counts and everybody knows it counts
- Someone looks at the outstanding list every week
- Write-offs are decisions with names on them
None of that requires software. It requires a rate card, a phone, and the decision that this is worth five minutes of attention every Monday.
Do one thing this week: ask each foreman what the customer asked for that was not in the quote. You will get a longer list than you expect, and some of it will still be inside fourteen days.
The conversation that gets a yes
The paperwork is the easy half. The reason extras go unbilled is that somebody has to have a conversation, and most people would rather absorb the cost than have it.
It goes considerably better with a structure.
Raise it the moment it is found, not at the end. A customer told on Tuesday that the sheathing underneath is rotten is being given information. The same customer told at final invoice is being given a bill. Identical work, completely different reception, and the difference is entirely timing.
Lead with the finding, not the money. "We pulled the old layer off and found rot across about a third of the deck — I want to show you before we cover it." A photo does most of the work here. The customer is now looking at a problem, and you are the person who found it rather than the person charging for it.
Give them the consequence of each option. Replace it now at this cost, or leave it and understand what that means for the warranty and the life of the roof. Most people choose correctly when the choice is laid out plainly, and the ones who decline have made an informed decision that you have documented.
State the number and the schedule impact together. "$1,840 and it adds a day." Incomplete information invites a second conversation; complete information invites a decision.
Then ask for the approval explicitly. "Can you reply to this text with a yes and we'll get it done today?" Without the ask you get a conversation and no record, which is exactly where unbilled extras come from.
The crew member who finds the problem does not need to run this conversation — but they do need to know that stopping and calling you takes two minutes, and that nothing gets covered up before you have seen it.
Approval rates on well-raised extras run above 80%. The ones that get refused are almost always the ones raised late.
The 10 Numbers I Check Every Monday
One page. Ten minutes, every Monday. Every number has a line next to it that tells you when to act.
Get the sheet — freeCommon questions
Does a text message count as change order approval?
In practice, a clear text saying yes to a specific scope and price is a far better record than the verbal agreement most extras are based on. Formal signed change orders are stronger, and for large amounts they are worth the extra step. For a four-hour extra, a text you actually get beats a form you do not.
What do I do about extras already outside fourteen days?
Decide deliberately rather than letting them drift. Either call the customer, explain plainly what was added and why it was not on the original quote, and ask — you will collect more than you expect — or write it off on purpose and note the reason. What costs money is the third option, which is doing neither.
How do I price small extras quickly?
Build a rate card of your twenty most common extras with prices. When the crew texts a request, the office answers from the card in under a minute. The speed is what makes the process work; a system that requires building an estimate will be bypassed by a crew member standing in front of a waiting customer.