Variations now carry their own approval trail

The job you quoted and the job you're standing in are different jobs. The wall came off and there's more behind it. That's normal — what isn't normal is how much of this industry's disputes come from that moment being handled in a phone call nobody wrote down.

Extra work now has a record that runs from the technician who found it to the invoice that bills it.

Four steps, each of them a record

1. The technician raises it from the job

On site, from the phone: what was found, in their words. It takes about thirty seconds. The office is notified straight away rather than on Friday, and the request is stamped with who raised it and when.

2. The office prices it as a variation quote

Not an edit to the original quote — a variation in its own right, numbered separately, linked to the job. The original stays exactly as the customer accepted it, which is the whole point when someone asks six months later what was agreed at the start.

3. The customer approves it themselves

The variation goes out with its own approval link. The customer opens it, reads what the extra work is and what it costs, and accepts or declines — no login, no account.

That approval is timestamped. It is not "he said it was fine on the phone".

4. The board follows the decision

Send the variation and a sub-job is created for the extra work, named after what the work actually is rather than a reference number — so the board reads "Kitchen rewire — additional circuit for the island bench", not "Variation to Q-2026-0014".

Accepted, and the sub-job moves into the run. Declined, and it's settled rather than left sitting on the board as work nobody is going to do.

The trail itself

Every step above writes to the quote's timeline: sent, opened, reminded, responded, and by whom. The job's own audit trail carries the variation request alongside the status moves, the comments and the sign-off.

Neither can be edited after the fact. That is the property that makes it worth having — a record you can rewrite is not evidence of anything.

Where it shows up

• On the phone — raise a variation from the job menu; open ones are listed on the job with their status
• On the job detail — in the history, with everything else that happened
• On the quote — the full send-and-response timeline
• On the board — as a sub-job, named for the work

One thing worth doing

Tell your technicians to raise the variation before doing the work, not after. The feature works either way, but a customer approving extra work in advance is a very different conversation from a customer being shown an invoice for work they didn't know about.