Site OSThe programme will not wait
Something has to change and it has to change today. It gets agreed on site between two people who both mean it. Raising it properly takes a day the job does not have, so it is done and the paperwork is left for later.
Variation exposure calculator · free, no signup
Every fit-out contractor writes off variations they agreed on site and could not evidence later. Almost nobody knows the annual number, because it never appears as a line on anything. Put your own figures in and it does.
Last full year, near enough.
The size of job you do most of, not the biggest one you have done.
Across the small ones and the occasional large one.
Every change to the contracted scope, including the ones that never got priced.
Someone said go ahead, the programme would not wait, and nothing was raised at the time.
At final account, the ones you cannot evidence well enough to hold.
Used only to express the result as a share of profit.
These starting figures are starting figures, not research. They are a plausible mid-size fit-out contractor and nothing more. There is no study behind them and this page will not pretend otherwise — the result is worth exactly what your inputs are worth, which is why all seven are yours to change.
The two percentages are where the argument actually lives. A variation becomes a write-off in two steps, not one: it gets agreed without a written instruction, and then at final account you cannot evidence it well enough to hold it. Most contractors put the first number higher than they expect to and the second lower. Both are worth arguing about honestly.
Nothing here is a process failure. It is what happens when a programme moves faster than paperwork, which is every programme.
Something has to change and it has to change today. It gets agreed on site between two people who both mean it. Raising it properly takes a day the job does not have, so it is done and the paperwork is left for later.
The next thing happens. The instruction stays in a phone call, a WhatsApp message, or a photograph of a marked-up drawing on somebody's camera roll. It is not lost, exactly. It is just not anywhere a second person would look.
Months later, two reasonable parties remember it differently, and the one with the better record wins. Usually neither has one, so it gets split — and splitting it is the write-off. The relationship survives it. The margin does not.
Four things, and the fourth is the one that decides whether it is worth anything at final account.
"The client agreed" is not a record. A person agreed, and the record has to say which one.
Not the date it was written up. Those are different dates and the gap between them is what gets attacked.
A change agreed without a number attached is an argument scheduled for later.
A record either side could have changed after the fact proves nothing. This is the part a spreadsheet and an email thread cannot do, and it is the whole difference.
The contractual half of the same subject, written for the same reader. Neither asks for anything either.
A verbal instruction is not an instruction until somebody writes it down. What a CVI is under JCT and NEC, the deadlines that bite, the eight fields it needs, and a template you can copy.
The same event has four names depending on what you signed. Which word your contract actually uses, and the very different deadlines each one attaches.
The demo login and password are printed on the page. No form, no call to book.
If the number this gave you is wrong, that is the most useful thing you could tell me — I would rather have one contractor's real write-off percentage than another guess at it. Twenty minutes, no slides, and a reply from the person who built it.
