Change Orders: keeping the original estimate honest
Estimates change. Scope creeps, materials shift, owners ask for more. Change Orders give you a structured way to capture those amendments without rewriting the deal you already closed.
Every contractor we've talked to has the same story: an estimate gets accepted, work begins, and then reality intervenes. The homeowner wants a different tile. A wall opens up and reveals rot. The client asks for one more outlet, then two, then a whole new circuit. The original estimate — the one both sides signed — stops being the truth somewhere around week two.
Until now, our answer to that drift was unsatisfying: edit the estimate, or send a new one, or track the deltas in a notes field and reconcile at invoice time. None of those preserve what was actually agreed to, when, and why. So we built Change Orders.
A first-class record of what changed
A change order attaches to an accepted estimate and captures three things: the reason it exists, a description of the new scope, and the line items that go with it Create a Change Order. That structure matters. "Reason" is the audit trail — why did this amendment happen — and it's the field that protects you six months later when someone asks how the final number drifted from the bid. "Description" is the human-readable scope your client signs off on. The line items are what flow through to billing.
Critically, the original estimate stays intact. The bid you won is still the bid you won. Change orders sit alongside it as an ordered log of amendments, each one its own decision with its own paper trail.
Why not just edit the estimate?
We considered it. It's simpler to build and, on the surface, simpler to use. But editing the estimate destroys information: you lose the original price, the original scope, and the moment in time when both parties agreed. That information turns out to be exactly what you need when a dispute comes up, when you're calculating actual vs. estimated margin on a job, or when you're trying to understand why a project ran 30% over.
A dedicated change order, with its own reason and its own line items Create a Change Order, keeps that history immutable. The estimate is the contract. Change orders are the amendments. Same pattern lawyers have used for a hundred years, and for good reason.
What's next
This is the foundation. Now that change orders are a real object in the system, the obvious next steps are client-facing approval flows, automatic roll-up into invoices, and reporting that shows you, per job, how much of your final number came from the original bid versus everything that happened after. We'll ship those incrementally. For now, if you've ever finished a job and struggled to explain the gap between the estimate and the invoice, this is for you.