Change orders — the operational mechanics

Any change to scope, cost, expected milestone dates or milestone payment percentages goes through a change order. Bypass it and you've done undocumented work that's hard to recover.

Steps

1. Talk to the customer first. Discuss the change with them before you submit anything, on the phone or face to face if you can. A change order landing in someone's dashboard with no conversation behind it reads as a demand for more money. Submit what you've already talked through and agreed.
2. Open the project on your dashboard and use the change order button on it.
3. Describe the change and what it does to the price. A change might add cost, reduce it, or leave the price alone. Say which. Where it adds cost, enter the value excluding VAT; the usual Beams Builder Fee applies as it does on your original quote, and the platform works out the customer's total from the value, VAT and the fee. Where the change takes scope out, enter the amount coming off and we'll process the refund to the customer.
4. Set out the timeline effect, if there is one. Some changes move the milestone structure or the dates. Plenty don't. Only change what the work actually affects. Where you do need to: add or remove milestones, edit the payment percentages, move the dates, and give a revised completion date. Milestones the customer has already approved are locked. The same validation rules apply as when you set the milestones for the HIC.
5. The customer approves or rejects in their dashboard. Once you've both accepted, the change order becomes part of the HIC, and the milestone structure and timeline it sets out are the ones that count. If they reject it, you're both notified and it's logged as Rejected.
6. Check the funding, then start. See below.

How you get paid

There's no separate invoice and no separate pre-payment. An approved change order is added to the outstanding construction value, and you're paid through the remaining milestone payments.

Check funding before you start

Your dashboard shows whether the customer has put enough into their Beams Account to cover the next milestone. Check it once the change order is approved. If the next milestone is funded, get on with the work. If it isn't, wait, and give the customer a nudge.

This protects you as much as the customer

Any work you do that isn't covered by the original HIC or an approved change order is work you might not get paid for. If you crack on and the customer then refuses the change, there's nothing Beams can do about it. The change order is what makes the work payable.

It cuts the other way too. Most renovation disputes come from changes that were never formally agreed: verbal change orders, mid-build email exchanges nobody filed, "let's just do it and sort it out later". The record is the protection.

If a change is genuinely urgent

Safety-critical work that can't wait, like emergency structural remediation or an immediate fire or water risk, is the one case where you act first and document second. Make the site safe, then raise the change order with the customer straight away.

If the emergency was caused by your own work, it isn't a change order. You put it right at your own cost.