Three delivery modes per change order. Separate is a standalone invoice — the safest and most common, leaving the agreed schedule untouched. Split gives the change order its own titled schedule of payments. Merge spreads it across the remaining stages of the agreed schedule, changing amounts the customer has already seen.
Also called: surprise second invoice · customer feels double billed · how do I bill the extra · change order billing
Three ways to bill an extra, so it does not land as a surprise second bill
Bill the change order on its own, give it its own payment plan, or fold it into the payment schedule the customer already agreed to. Each choice is explained in the app in plain terms, including the cost of it — folding it in changes amounts the customer has already seen. A mid-project change between $5,000 and $100,000 arriving as its own invoice is what makes a customer feel double-billed.
Split one change order into buckets and send each one where it belongs
Name each bucket, give it an amount in dollars or as a percentage of the change order, and route it on its own. The materials can go out on their own invoice now while the labour is appended to the schedule and a third piece merges into the draw the customer is already expecting. The allocation line refuses to go green until the buckets sum to the change order total.
A merged extra shows up as its own line on the draw, not as a bigger number
When a bucket merges into a scheduled payment, it becomes an itemised change-order line on that invoice and the base amount stays fully visible above it. Every merged line records both the change order and the specific bucket that produced it, so an invoice line traces back to the extra the customer agreed to.
It will not touch an invoice the customer already has, and it will not bill twice
A merge is only allowed into a draft. A target already sent falls back to appending a new scheduled payment; a target that has gone falls back to a standalone invoice. Buckets already billed or already paid are skipped and reported as they are, so running the billing action a second time produces no second set of invoices — and a bucket that failed stays pending for a retry rather than being quietly dropped and underbilled.
The change order marks itself paid once every invoice it created has cleared
After a payment is recorded, the invoices that change order produced are checked, and only when all of them are settled does it move to paid. A bucket merged into a draw shares its invoice with the base payment, so that whole invoice has to clear before it counts. The change-order list becomes a collection tracker for extras, which is otherwise a cross-check you do by hand.
- 1The mode is chosen in the change-order editor and stamped on the header for fast display and filtering.
- 2Each mode is explained in the interface in plain language, including the trade-off.
- 3The scope (line items) locks once sent, but the billing plan stays editable until it has actually been billed.
- 4Once invoices are generated the billing controls lock, even before the parent refreshes, so re-running cannot double-bill.
A change order in the middle of a build, anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000, used to arrive as its own separate invoice — so a customer who had already paid a deposit and a progress draw felt billed twice for the same job. Each change order now gets a choice of how it reaches the customer: merged into an upcoming draw, spread across the remaining draws, or billed on its own. The option that alters draws the customer has already been shown says exactly that in plain words, because that is the one they will notice.
- Every change order arriving as a separate, surprising bill.
- No way to absorb an extra into an agreed payment plan.
- Large change orders with no instalment option.
See it on your own jobs
Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.
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