Variations

Approving a variation without losing control

The Construction Clinic · 4 min read

How to keep changes on site from quietly rewriting your budget and your completion date.

A variation is any change to the agreed work. Some are unavoidable. What causes damage is approving them verbally, in a hurry, without a cost or a time consequence attached.

Get three things in writing

What is changing, what it costs, and what it does to the programme. If any of the three is missing, the variation is not priced — it is deferred.

Keep a running total

Every approved change should update a single running figure you can see. Ten small changes are how most budgets are overrun, not one large one.

What a good builder quote includes

The line items, exclusions and assumptions that separate a real quote from a number on a page.

Contracts

Reading a building contract before you sign

The handful of clauses that decide what happens when the project slips, changes or goes wrong.

Snagging

Snagging and the final payment

What to inspect, how to record it, and why the last payment is your strongest position.