Change Orders
Price the change once, and be able to defend it.
A structured cost breakdown by category, overhead and profit applied the same way every time, a proposal document worth putting your name on, and a status that still means something three months later when somebody asks what was approved.
Pricing
Two markup tiers, because that is how the work is priced.
Your own crews and a subcontractor's quote do not carry the same markup, and a proposal that pretends otherwise is a proposal you cannot defend in a negotiation.
- Estimate rows are typed by category — labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, unit price — and grouped into named scope sections that print the way you priced them.
- Overhead and profit applies to your self-performed work as one rate; subcontractor quotes carry their own, separate markup on top of the subcontractor subtotal.
- A subcontractor's own markup inside their quote can be carried on the line, so what you are marking up is what you were actually quoted.
- Bond and insurance percentages are there when a job needs them, applied to the marked-up total. Both default to zero and print no line when unused.
- The defaults are set once and editable per proposal, so the same change priced twice comes out the same both times.
The document
One PDF, with the backup behind it.
- A proposal on your own letterhead: project and proposal header, the recipient and reference grid, the scope narrative, the priced scope sections, and the pricing ladder down to the total.
- Schedule impact and exclusions or clarifications print as their own blocks, with defaults set per job so the language you always use is already there.
- Signature blocks for the architect, the sender and the accepting party — printed as lines to sign, because nothing here is signed electronically.
- One combined package: the proposal with the subcontractor quotes and your PDF backup appended behind it, as a single download.
- A printable change order log for the whole job — number, name, status, value, comments — for the meeting where somebody asks what is outstanding.
The proposal is a REQ Suite document in the layout the trade expects. It is not an official AIA form, and REQ Suite does not claim to issue one.
Sending
Email it from inside the app — and nothing else happens.
- Type or paste the general contractor's address and one optional Cc, and edit the subject and the covering note.
- The message goes out as 'Your Company via REQ Suite' on a reqbuild.com address, with Reply-To set to your own work email — so the GC's reply lands in your inbox, not in a shared alias. Nothing is sent from your own mail server, and you see the exact From and Reply-To before you commit.
- Contacts saved against the project appear as one-click suggestions for the To and Cc fields. They are suggestions; the fields are ordinary fields.
- The send is written permanently into the proposal's history: who sent it, when, to whom.
Sending is communication, not a workflow step. A proposal’s status never moves because you hit send, and a status change never requires an email. Success means the mail provider accepted the message; REQ Suite does not claim delivery confirmation or read receipts, because it subscribes to no delivery webhooks.
Approved value
One status decides what counts.
Approved-to-date is computed from the log by status alone. A populated amount does not make a proposal approved, and a zero amount does not make an approved one un-approved.
- Six statuses, all set by a person: draft, submitted, under review, approved, rejected, void.
- Approved is the only one that counts toward approved value. A dollar figure typed on a draft contributes nothing, and a zero or deductive approval counts exactly as recorded.
- Revising a proposal links the revision to the original, and every roll-up reduces a lineage to its current revision — so a superseded proposal can never be counted twice.
- Approving a proposal is checked against the screen you were looking at: the server recomputes the total from saved data and refuses the approval if the on-screen amount does not match.
- Once a proposal leaves draft it is read-only. Unlocking it grants thirty minutes, is recorded, and does not itself change the status.
| COP | Description | Status | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| COP-001 | Added floor drains — Level 1 mechanical room | Approved | $12,414.20 |
| COP-002 | Condensate piping reroute at grid C-4 | Approved | $16,809.80 |
| COP-004 | RTU curb adapters — roof level | Approved | $55,276.00 |
| COP-005 | Owner-requested exhaust fan upsizing | Under review | $31,200.00 |
| Approved changes — in contract value | $84,500.00 | ||
| Not approved — tracked, out of contract value | $31,200.00 | ||
Requisitions applies the same approved-only rule to the contract sum on the certificate — recorded there by the person doing the billing, not pushed across from here. The project Overview in REQ Suite shows you both answers on one screen. How the pay application handles it
Straight answers
Straight answers about change orders.
Who else uses REQ Suite?
We are at the founding-customer stage, and we are not going to invent a customer list. The most useful answer we can give you is a working demo with your own numbers: bring last month's approved pay application and we will rebuild it in REQ Suite so you can check it line by line against the one your GC already paid.
What does it cost?
$150 a month for the company, with unlimited projects. It is one subscription for the workflow, not a charge per project, so a month where you bill nine jobs costs what a month where you bill three costs. It is published here rather than quoted on a call, because you should be able to find out what software costs without booking one.
What happens to my records if I stop using it?
Every payment application exports as a PDF and as a three-sheet spreadsheet, and every change order proposal as a PDF. Those are the formats your general contractor and your accountant already accept, so your records leave in a shape somebody else can read.
Does an approved change order update my pay application automatically?
No. Change Orders computes what has been approved from its own log; the person doing the billing records the change on the requisition. Both applications apply the same approved-only rule, and the project Overview shows you both answers on one screen — but nothing writes to a certified financial document on its own.
Does emailing a proposal to the GC approve it?
No, and it deliberately cannot. Sending is communication, not a workflow step: a proposal's status only moves when a person moves it, and a status change never requires an email. Nothing in REQ Suite approves anything by itself.
Get started
See it on one of your own projects.
Bring a change order you priced last month. We will build it in REQ Suite with your markup structure so you can see what the proposal would have gone out looking like.