Change order logs that maintain themselves.
We encode each contract’s change-order rules against the job data you already keep, so the log maintains itself and every approved change reaches billing.
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NVIDIA
Anthropic
The field said yes. The pay app never heard.
From contractors we have sat with: general contractors and specialty subs between $10M and $100M, not shopping for software — drowning between the field approval and the billing cycle.
Approved in the field, missing from the pay app
The work got a verbal yes and it is done, but the change order never reached the schedule of values. The money sits unbilled until someone reconciles the log against the pay application — which is to say, eventually.
The log and the pay app don’t reconcile
The change-order log and the pay application have to reconcile every cycle — and they don’t. The gap between approved and billed widens, and nobody owns the difference.
Notice windows missed before anyone saw them
The contract required written notice within days of the field change. It went out late or never — a legitimate change became a negotiation or a giveaway.
Priced from memory, not the contract
The contract sets the markup on change-order work, but pricing happens from memory — labor, material, and equipment each with their own rate, consistent only while somebody remembers.
The rules walked out the door
Which owner wants change orders as separate lines — it lived in one person’s head. She left, and nobody has systematically checked a change order against the contract since.
Unbilled change orders are a line item, not a feeling.
What the manual way looks like at a contractor running its log in a spreadsheet and its rules in someone’s head. Your numbers will differ — the first job we reconcile puts figures on yours before anything gets built.
From anonymized engagements — general contractors and specialty subs, $10–100M in revenue
We encode your exceptions.
No new system for your team to learn. The change-order rules your best person carries in their head become the log.
- 01
Reconcile one job’s log
We reconcile one job’s change-order log against the last three pay applications — approved in the field, priced, billed. That gap is where the rule set starts.
- 02
Encode the contract’s change-order rules
Notice window, signature chain, pricing and markup, when the change enters the schedule of values — documented end-to-end against the job data you already keep, yours to keep.
- 03
The log maintains itself
Field approvals feed the log; priced, approved changes sequence into the schedule of values. Anything approved but unbilled lands in an exception queue your team reviews each cycle.
A template logs the change order. It can’t get it onto the pay app.
The spreadsheet template is the real incumbent for the mid-market GC. A template logs the change order — it cannot get it approved, priced, or onto the pay application, which is where the money is.
The construction software holds the job data; change-order software sells another system to adopt. Neither holds your approval rules — the notice windows, the markup, the sequencing your PM negotiated. We encode those; our AI reads each approved change against them, every cycle.
Led by Peter Enestrom.
Asked by GC controllers and owners.
The straight answers, before you book anything.
A change order log is the running record of every change to a construction contract after it is signed: what was requested, what was priced, who approved it, and when. For change orders in construction, the log is the control point between the field and billing — it is how an approved change makes its way into the schedule of values and onto a pay application.
At minimum, each entry needs a reference number, the scope of the change, who requested it, the submitted and approved pricing, the approval status with dates, and the contract’s notice requirements. The field most templates omit is the one that matters most: the schedule-of-values line the approved change will bill against. Without it, the log records the change but never connects it to billing.
On paper, the project manager or project engineer owns it, because change orders originate in the field. In practice at a mid-market contractor, the controller ends up owning it at billing time, because the log only matters when it ties to the pay application. Shared ownership is the usual failure mode: the field assumes the office logged it, and the office assumes the field priced it.
Once approved, a change order is added to the schedule of values — as a separate line or folded into an existing one, depending on the contract — and its work bills in the period it is performed, like any other line. The named failure mode is sequencing: a change approved in the field that never reaches the schedule of values does not get billed. The log and the pay application have to reconcile every cycle — and under the manual way, they do not.
A change order is a signed agreement between the owner and the contractor that changes the scope, price, or schedule of the contract before the work proceeds. A construction change directive is a unilateral instruction from the owner: the work proceeds before the price is settled, and the cost is negotiated later. Directives belong on the same log, with the contract’s notice and documentation rules attached from the day the directive lands — unresolved directives are the ones most likely to reach closeout unbilled.
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Tell us where your team loses hours. We will come back with a straight answer on whether AI can help, what it would take, and what it would pay.