Getting Paid
The Job Changed. Getting Paid for It Shouldn't Be a Fight.
No job survives contact with the building. The electrician opens the panel and finds aluminum wire, the plumber opens the wall and finds rot, and the roofer pulls shingles and finds decking that crumbles in his hand. The customer walks the job halfway through and says, "while you're here, could you also …"
Every trade has its version. The work changes. That part is normal and always will be. What kills you is what happens next, because most of us handle a mid-job change one of two ways, and both of them cost real money.
The two ways it usually goes
The first way is the handshake. You're standing in front of the customer, the crew is there, the wall is open. "Yeah, we'll take care of that." You do the extra work because you're a professional and the job needs it. Then the final invoice goes out, the number is bigger than the contract, and now you're in an argument about a conversation two people remember differently. Best case, you get paid late. Worst case, you eat it, and if you've been in the trades more than a year, you've eaten one.
The second way is the re-quote. The careful guys go the other way: stop, redo the whole proposal with the change folded in, send the new bigger number. It feels safer. But you just handed the customer the entire deal to reopen. Now they're not looking at the change, they're re-reading line four and asking why demolition costs what it costs. A price they already agreed to is back on the table. You turned one small decision into a renegotiation of the whole job.
The rule that fixes both: a signed price never changes, and a change never touches it. The change gets its own price, its own signature, and its own line on the bill.
How the clean version works
This is how I run it now, and it's how TradeGOAT is built to run it, because I got tired of both failure modes.
- The original price freezes the moment it's signed. Nobody ever edits a signed number, not you, not the customer, not the software. That's the customer's protection as much as yours, and it's what makes everything after this possible.
- The change gets written down while you're standing in it. Two questions: what changed, and what's it worth? Price the change with the same rates you priced the job with, not a panic number invented at the tailgate.
- The customer signs the change, not a new contract. The paperwork covers just the delta: here's the thing we found or the thing you added, here's what it costs. The customer makes one decision. The original deal never reopens, because the original deal never changed.
- The change becomes its own line on the bill. It doesn't blend into the total where nobody can find it later. Job total = the contract everyone signed, plus each change everyone signed. Anyone can audit it in ten seconds.
And keep the history. Every change on the job is listed in one place, each with its signature. When the owner, the GC, or anyone else asks why the final bill is bigger than the contract, and someone always asks, you don't reach for your memory. You hand them the list.
Why this beats "just being flexible"
Some contractors think paperwork on every change makes them look rigid. My experience is the opposite. The guy with the handshake looks flexible right up until the invoice argument, and then he has nothing on paper to show for extra work he really did. The guy with a one-page signed change looks like a professional the whole way through, and he gets paid for every bit of the work.
There's a quieter benefit too. When every change is priced and signed on its own, you find out which kinds of changes keep happening. If every third job grows fifteen percent after signing, that's not bad luck, it's information about how you're scoping work in the first place. You can't see the pattern when the extras are buried in handshakes and blended totals.
The test for your own business
Pull your last five jobs and ask three questions. Did the work change on any of them? (It did.) Can you point to a signed piece of paper for each change? And did every one of those changes show up as its own line in what you billed? If the answer to the last two is no, you're not running a change process, you're running on luck and goodwill, and both run out.
The fix isn't complicated. It's a rule and a habit: signed prices freeze, changes get their own signature, and the bill shows both. Get there however you can, with software or with a carbon-copy pad. It's some of the easiest money in your business to stop losing.
Changes priced, signed, and on the bill — without reopening the deal
TradeGOAT freezes every signed price and writes each change as its own signed line, priced from your own rates, with paperwork that covers just the change — and the job's money updates the moment it's signed.
Start free — 90 days of Pro →We hand you the top tier for ninety days because that is long enough to finish a job and find out what it made. Every feature, up to 25 users, and we load your documents with you. The first 25 companies in keep half price for as long as they stay. A company name and an email is the entire signup — no credit card. Or drive the demo first — no signup.