Construction Control

Construction Control — Articles

Will This Extra Work Get Paid? A Change-Order and T&M Backup Checklist

When extra work is disputed, the paper trail is what gets examined. The crew did the work, sometimes on a verbal "go ahead," and the proof of it is a stack of field tickets. Weeks later, at billing time, whether that work gets paid depends in part on what those tickets say, whether anyone signed them, and whether they connect — ticket to change-order request to pay application — without the numbers changing along the way.

That chain can break in several places. Here are the failure modes that turn performed work into disputed, deducted, or never-billed work, and the check that catches each one before the application goes out.

1. The ticket was never signed

A time-and-material ticket is evidence, and unsigned evidence is just an assertion. Rhumbix's T&M guidance is blunt about the fix: have the owner's or GC's representative sign time tickets daily or weekly, while the work is still visible and memorable, because a contemporaneous signature can help head off later disputes about whether the hours were worked or authorized. Some subcontracts make it a formal requirement — daily Extra Work Authorization tickets submitted for acknowledgement by the GC's project manager, with a minimum field set such as: the change proposal number, the date, a description and location of the work, the authorizing representative, craft names, hours and rates, and material and equipment quantities and costs.

Before you bill: pull the ticket stack for the period and check every ticket for the signature or acknowledgement and the complete field set. A ticket missing its authorizing representative is incomplete backup — chase the signature now, or hold that ticket out of billing until it's acknowledged (subject to your subcontract's billing and notice deadlines). This check happens in the field and in the office, not in a spreadsheet; no software signs a ticket for you. The workbook's Missing fields check flags tickets with required fields left blank. The fields it checks are the ones the ticket log carries — date, scope of work, labor hours, and loaded hourly rate; the log has no signature or authorizing-representative field, so the check cannot confirm that a ticket was signed.

2. The same ticket got counted twice

Tickets arrive as carbon copies, phone photos, and email attachments, sometimes days apart. The same day's work gets entered twice under slightly different descriptions, the change-order total inflates, and a duplicate, once found, can give a reviewer a reason to question the rest of the package.

Before you bill: sort the period's tickets by ticket number, date, and crew and look for the same work appearing twice. One ticket, one entry, one place in the totals.

3. Tickets never linked to a change order — and change orders with nothing behind them

These are mirror-image failures. In one, a pile of signed tickets exists but no change-order request ties them to the contract's change mechanism, so the work floats: unbilled, or billed on a line the reviewer can't trace to anything. In the other, a change-order request gets written from a quick estimate and no tickets are ever attached to it. Polar Path calls a change order without supporting documentation 'a negotiation, not a record.'

Before you bill: reconcile in both directions. Every ticket should name the change-order request it belongs to; every change-order request should name the tickets behind it. A ticket with no COR and a COR with no tickets are the same problem seen from opposite ends.

4. The change-order amount drifted away from its tickets

The change-order request is written early, from an estimate. The work runs longer, the tickets accumulate, and nobody updates either number. By the time the COR is approved or billed, its amount and its own backup disagree — and a pending change order whose tickets don't support its figure is the kind of mismatch a reviewer may question. T&M work has a second version of this drift: the billing depends on proof of hours, so ticket hours that don't reconcile against payroll hours undermine both numbers.

Before you bill: for every pending change-order request, add up its tickets and compare the total to the COR amount. Any difference gets explained and corrected while the COR is still pending — not discovered by the GC after it's billed.

5. The change order was billed before it was approved

Levelset lists billing for unapproved change orders among the payment-application mistakes subcontractors make. Your subcontract may require a written, issued change order before it can be billed; a verbal direction to proceed may not satisfy that. Billing it anyway can give the reviewer a reason to return the application.

Before you bill: bill only change-order requests with written approval behind them, unless your subcontract provides otherwise. Keep the pending ones in their own log with their ticket backup building behind them, so that the backup is already assembled when approval lands.

6. The approved change order never reached the pay application

This one is easy to miss because no single entry looks wrong. The change order was approved, the approval was filed, and the amount simply never got added to the schedule of values — or it was added at a stale figure from an earlier draft instead of the approved value. The work is done, the entitlement is documented, and the money is never asked for, or asked for wrong.

Before you bill: reconcile the approved change-order list against the pay application line by line. Every approved COR should be present, at exactly its approved value — no more, no less.

That comparison is the same one walked through in why a pay application doesn't match its change orders — the three divergences, and the check for each.

Where the workbook fits — and where it doesn't

The checks in sections 2, 3, 4, and 6 are one reconciliation: tickets to change-order requests to the pay-app schedule of values, compared in both directions, checking that amounts agree along the chain. That reconciliation is the part we built a tool for. Construction Control is an Excel workbook for use alongside your AIA G702/G703 that reconciles T&M tickets to change-order requests to the pay-app schedule of values and flags seven exceptions by name: Duplicate ticket, Missing fields, Unlinked ticket, COR without backup, Pending COR vs ticket mismatch, Approved COR missing from pay app, and Approved COR vs billed value.

Be clear about the boundaries. The workbook does not approve change orders — approval is the GC's written decision, and no formula substitutes for it. It does not capture the field signature from section 1; that is a jobsite habit, and the workbook only sees the ticket once someone brings it back. It does not check your G702/G703 totals. It does not check ticket hours against payroll. And it does not make a GC pay. What it does is flag where the tickets, the change-order requests, and the pay application disagree, so you can correct them before you submit.

If you want the pre-billing pass in printable form, our Pay App Pre-Submission Checklist is a free one-page PDF that includes the ticket and change-order items above. And if the ticket-to-change-order reconciliation is the part that eats your time, the full workbook is the Construction Control Subcontractor Pay App Bridge, a one-time $39 purchase.

The underlying principle is the same one behind every item on this list: the time to find out a ticket is unsigned, unlinked, or double-counted is before the billing goes out — while the work is still memorable and the tickets are still on the desk.

Related