By Ryan Kramer, founder of Wisegrid. Last updated July 2026.
Every contractor knows the moment. You are mid-job, up a ladder or halfway through a pour, and the homeowner wanders over: “While you’re here, could you also…”
And most of us just say yes. And eat it.
A verbal yes on site is how a $2,000 extra becomes free work. Multiply that across a year of jobs and the un-logged change order is probably the single biggest money leak in a small construction business. Not materials pricing, not labor, not the weather. The extras you did and never billed.
Why change orders go unbilled
Three reasons, and none of them are “bad at business”:
- The request is verbal and small. “It’s just a hallway repaint.” You say yes to be agreeable, and there is no paper anywhere.
- The awkwardness tax. Bringing up money mid-job with a client you like feels adversarial, so you skip it and plan to “sort it out at the end.” At the end, you round down.
- You genuinely forget. Five jobs, forty texts a day. The window upgrade from three weeks ago is a memory, not a line item.
The fix for all three is the same: a change order log that lives where the work lives.
The change order log, line by line
One sheet per job. Every request gets a line the moment it comes up, before anything gets built:
| Date | Requested by | What they asked for | Cost | Days added | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 20 | Homeowner | Move kitchen island plumbing 3 feet | $1,850 | 2 | Approved |
| Jun 28 | Homeowner | Upgrade to casement windows | $3,200 | 4 | Approved |
| Jul 5 | Inspector | Add egress window well in basement | $2,400 | 3 | Approved |
| Jul 12 | Homeowner | “While you’re here”: repaint the hallway | $650 | 1 | Pending |
| Jul 15 | Homeowner | Extend the deck 4 feet | $2,900 | 3 | Pending |
That job carries $7,450 in approved extras. Billed, not eaten. The two pending rows are not started, because pending means pending.
Two columns do the heavy lifting:
- Cost. The rule is simple: every extra gets a price before it gets a yes. “Happy to do that. It’s $650 and adds a day. Want me to put it on the change log?” is a normal, friendly sentence. It turns an awkward money conversation into a routine one.
- Days added. Those three approved changes added nine days to the schedule. When the homeowner asks why you are still there in week eight, the answer is on the sheet, in their own requests.
Make the log the shared truth
A change order log on your laptop is better than nothing. A change order log the client can see is a different sport. When the log is a live sheet you share with the homeowner, both of you look at the same list. Approving an extra stops being an argument and becomes a status change. Nothing is a surprise at final invoice, because they watched every line get added.
This is where a spreadsheet with sharing beats a paper form or a PDF: the sheet is the agreement, and it is always current.
Set it up in five minutes
You can build this in any spreadsheet. If you want it pre-built, with the status colors and the columns ready to fill, grab the free change order log template. It is a live Wisegrid sheet, which means it is literally just like Excel to use, and you can share it with the client, keep it next to the job budget, and never re-draw it for the next job.
While you’re plugging the money leaks, do the same for getting paid: a draw schedule does for invoices what the change log does for extras, and our job profit calculator answers the question every contractor should ask at the end of a job: did this one actually make money?
More on running small jobs profitably: construction project management templates and the scope of work template.