The subcontractor change order process, from the sub’s side of the table

Search “construction change order process” and you get a flowchart drawn by somebody who approves change orders for a living.

That is not your job. You are the one who asks. You do the work, or you don’t; you submit a number, or you miss the window; and then you wait on a decision made by three people who have never spoken to your foreman. The process looks completely different from this side of the table, and almost nobody writes it down that way.

So here it is, in the seven stages it actually has.

This is process, not legal advice — what you are owed is decided by your subcontract and your state’s law.

Stage 1: Know what your contract did to you

Before any of this matters, read two things in your subcontract.

The notice clause. Nearly every commercial subcontract says you must give written notice of a changed condition within a set number of days of discovering it. Five days. Ten days. Sometimes forty-eight hours. Miss it and the GC gets a contractual argument for paying you nothing, no matter how obviously the work was extra.

The written-direction clause. It almost certainly says that verbal direction doesn’t count, and that only a named person can authorize extra work. Your superintendent pointing at a wall is not that person.

Those two clauses decide more change order outcomes than the merits of the change ever will. Pull the numbers out of every active subcontract, put them somewhere your PM can see them, and treat the notice period as a hard deadline, not a formality.

Stage 2: Recognize it the day it happens

A change order dies in stage 2 more often than anywhere else, and it dies quietly.

The field sees something wrong on Tuesday. They work around it, because that is what good crews do. Nobody writes anything down. Three weeks later the office finds out, and by then the condition has been covered up, the superintendent remembers it differently, and the notice window closed eleven days ago.

The fix is not a form. It is a habit: anything that doesn’t match the drawings gets logged the same day, by the person who saw it. The things worth logging:

• A field condition that doesn’t match the contract documents.
• Work directed verbally by anyone on the GC’s staff.
• An RFI answer that quietly adds scope.
• A drawing revision or architect’s instruction issued after you bought or fabricated.
• Another trade’s work that blocks yours, or damages what you already installed.
• A schedule change that forces you out of sequence, into overtime, or back for a second mobilization.
• Work you were asked to do “to keep moving,” with the price to be sorted out later.

Each of those is a change event — not yet a change order, not yet a number. Just a dated record with photos that says: this happened, on this job, in this location, and this person was there. Log it in minutes, from the field, and the notice clause stops being a threat.

Stage 3: Document before you price

Document first, price second. Subs who do it backwards lose arguments about the number when the real argument is about whether the work was extra at all.

If the work has already happened, the evidence is a signed field ticket — a T&M ticket written the day of, with the name of whoever directed it. If it hasn’t happened yet, the evidence is the condition: photos, the drawing it contradicts, the RFI or instruction number, and the date.

Either way the point is the same. You are building a package a stranger can read in six months and agree with.

Stage 4: Price it, and price it honestly

Now you put a number on it. The pricing mechanics are their own subject; three things matter at the process level.

Price it out of your own rate lists. Not a round number from memory. Labor by classification, material at what you actually paid, equipment, and whatever markup your subcontract allows. Consistency is credibility: a sub whose numbers always reconcile gets the benefit of the doubt on the next one.

Include the costs people forget. Remobilization. A second trip for a two-hour task. Stocking material twice. Extended supervision on a job that slid four weeks. These are real and they are usually left off, which is the same as donating them.

Split lump sum from T&M deliberately. A defined scope you can take off should be lump sum. An open-ended condition nobody can measure yet should be T&M, with a cap if the GC insists. Agreeing on which before the work starts prevents the worst conversation in this business: the one where you’ve done 180 hours on a “small” item and the GC thinks he bought it for a fixed price.

Stage 5: Submit, and understand the chain you just entered

You send a change order request — a COR, or a PCO in some GCs’ language. What happens next is slower than it should be, and knowing why keeps your follow-up aimed at the right person.

Typically: your COR lands in the GC’s own change log. The GC’s PM reviews it, sometimes bundles it with other trades’ requests, and forwards it to the owner or the owner’s rep for pricing approval. The architect may weigh in on whether it’s a design change or something you should have caught at bid. If the owner approves, it comes back down as an executed change order and your subcontract value changes.

Three practical consequences:

1. Your COR is one line in somebody else’s log. Your number, your reference and your description need to be unmistakable, because the person deciding will never call you to clarify.
2. “Submitted” is not a status. It’s a starting gun. A COR with no follow-up sits.
3. Sometimes the owner directs the work before agreeing to the price — a construction change directive, or just a GC saying proceed. That’s a legitimate instruction to work, and it is also the moment to get the direction in writing and start tracking cost daily, because the price fight is coming later and your daily records will be the whole case.

Stage 6: Chase it — and know who owes the next move

This is the stage everybody skips, and it is where the money is.

Every open change order sits with exactly one party. Either you owe something — a revised number, backup, a breakdown the GC asked for — or they do. If you can’t say which, in one sentence, for every open item, the item is drifting.

So track two things on every change order:

• Status, in words that mean something: identified, priced, submitted, GC reviewing, owner reviewing, approved, rejected, or voided.
• Age in that status. A COR that has been “GC reviewing” for fifty-one days is a different problem from one submitted on Thursday, and only the age tells you that.

Then work it on a fixed rhythm. Fifteen minutes, once a week, over the whole list. Anything sitting more than two weeks gets an email with the COR number, the date submitted, the amount and one question. Anything over a month gets a phone call. You are not being difficult — you are being the sub whose change orders are easy to remember.

And watch the total. The sum of everything pending is unapproved work you have either already performed or committed to perform. On a job running hot that number can quietly reach a serious fraction of your contract value, and it belongs in front of your owner every week, not in somebody’s inbox.

Stage 7: Approved — now get it onto the billing

An approved change order is not money. It’s permission to bill.

The moment it’s executed, it has to land in two places or you will lose it anyway. It has to raise your contract value, so your percent-complete math stops being wrong. And it has to appear on your schedule of values as something you can bill against — a line, or an addition to an existing line, depending on what you negotiated with the GC.

Change orders approved in month four and first billed in month seven are one of the most common unforced errors in subcontract billing. The work is done, the paperwork is signed, and the cash is still sitting in your “approved” folder because nobody moved it onto the pay app.

And when it’s rejected

It happens. Sometimes it’s a genuine disagreement about scope; sometimes the owner just says no.

If you have signed tickets, dated photographs and a written instruction, you have a claim and you should decide deliberately whether to press it. If you have none of those, you have a lesson — and it’s always the same lesson, which is stage 2.

What you do next depends almost entirely on what you wrote down at the time, which is why stage 2 is the one worth drilling into your field staff. A log with dates on it is how you find out whether they’re doing it.

The four things that break this process

Having watched it break, it’s nearly always one of these:

1. The field tells the office late. Fatal, because the notice clause is already blown.
2. The change lives in one person’s email. When that person is on vacation, the change order stops existing.
3. Nobody tracks age. A list of open COs with no dates on it can’t tell you what’s stuck.
4. Approved change orders never make it onto the SOV. You won the argument and didn’t collect.

Notice that three of the four are information-handling problems, not negotiation problems. That’s the good news. They’re fixable.

How SubMark runs it

SubMark was built for the sub’s side of this, so stages 2 through 7 map straight onto it.

The field logs a change event with photos the day it happens, from a phone, which is stage 2 solved. If the work gets done on time and material, it becomes a T&M tag priced off your own rate lists and signed by the GC’s superintendent on the spot — and a month of signed tags converts into one change order instead of eleven arguments. Every change order carries its status, how long since it was submitted and the amount requested, so your weekly pass over the list takes minutes and nothing sits unnoticed. When one is approved, it’s added to your schedule of values automatically, so the thing you fought for is a billable line before the next draw instead of sitting in a folder.

What SubMark does not do is pretend to be the GC’s system. You’ll still submit through Textura, GCPay or whatever portal the job uses. SubMark is where your own record of every change lives — one place, with dates on it, that your PM and your owner can both read.

The stage-by-stage version of that chain — the statuses a request actually moves through, the aging buckets, and what happens the moment one is approved — is on the change order management page.

See how it fits together on the product page, or check what it costs — field crews are free and unlimited, so your foremen logging change events never show up on the bill.