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Change orders: billing the extra work
Web app4 min readUpdated
A change order is one job on one date at one price — the flood, the move-out, the carpet nobody planned for. Send it and the client gets a one-page approval link with no account and no PDF to sign; their name and the timestamp are captured as the record. Approved work is then added to that month’s consolidated invoice as its own line, taxed the same way the visits are unless you marked that order non-taxable. Change orders are for commercial customers on consolidated billing, because the extra rides an invoice that already exists.
Extra work is where janitorial money leaks. Not because it is not done — the crew does it, usually the same night somebody asks — but because nobody bills for it. It gets agreed in a corridor, remembered by one person, and absorbed.
A change order is the smallest document that fixes that: one job, on one date, at one price, with the client's approval attached to it.
What a change order is, and is not
It is a single piece of extra work against a contract that already exists. The sprinkler discharge on the third floor. The suite that has to be cleaned after a tenant moves out. The strip and wax somebody wants doing over a weekend.
It is deliberately not a recurring thing. Work that happens every week is not extra work — it is a change to the spec, and it belongs on the schedule and in the quote. If you find yourself raising the same change order monthly, the contract is what needs editing.
It also only adds. Money going back the other way is a credit on an invoice, which is a different document with different rules about who may approve it.
Raising one
Change orders in the main navigation, then Raise a change order. You name the client and, when they have more than one building, the site. Then:
- What the work is. A title the client will recognise on an invoice a month from now, and a description with enough detail to settle an argument.
- The price, as one figure. A change order is not itemised — it is a number the client says yes or no to.
- Whether it is taxable. Extra cleaning is taxed like cleaning, so this follows your usual rate, but a genuinely non-taxable extra can be marked as such.
- The service date — when the work is expected to happen.
It gets its own number, CO-2026-000001, in its own sequence. That is separate
from your quote numbering on purpose: a client reading "CO-14" next to "Q-14"
on the same statement should not have to work out which is which.
While it is a draft you can edit it freely. Once it has been sent, the content is fixed — the client is looking at a page that has to still say what it said when they read it.
Getting it approved
Send it, and the client gets a link to a single page: what the work is, what it costs, and one button. No account, no password, no PDF to print, sign and scan back. It works on a phone, which is where a facilities manager reads it.
When they approve, their name and the moment they did it are captured against the order. That is the record you needed and, if you have been agreeing extras in corridors, never used to have. They can also decline, with a reason, and that is worth having too — "landlord is covering this one" is the kind of thing that is useful three months later.
You can also withdraw an order you have sent, if the job goes away.
The statuses you will see on the list:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Yours, still editable, not seen by anybody |
| Waiting on the client | Sent; the approval link is live |
| Approved | They said yes, with a name and a timestamp |
| Declined | They said no, usually with a reason |
| Withdrawn | You pulled it before it was decided |
How it gets billed
An approved change order is added to that month's invoice for the client, as its own line, alongside the visits. A taxable one is taxed at the same rate the visits are; one you marked non-taxable when you raised it stays untaxed, even where the visits on the same invoice are taxed. Nothing is invented, and nothing is quietly absorbed — the extra becomes one more line on a bill they were already going to pay, which is all it ever should have been.
That is also why change orders are for commercial customers on consolidated billing. The monthly invoice is the only thing that bills them, so a customer who is invoiced per visit has nothing for the extra to ride. Switch the customer to consolidated billing first, in their record, and the option appears.
For the same reason, your company has to be doing commercial work at all — service mode commercial or both in Commercial cleaning mode. A change order exists because a standing contract is already in place.
Where to look
- The Change orders list, filtered by status, is the whole picture.
- A client's own record shows theirs, so you can see what a building has cost beyond the contract.
- The month's invoice shows the approved ones as lines, which is where the money actually arrives.