How to charge for change orders without the fight

We hear a version of this story every week, and it usually starts under a sink. A tech opens the cabinet to do the job he was sent for and finds a rotted shutoff valve next to it. He's a good tech, so he fixes it. Free. Because the honest alternative is stopping the job, calling the customer at work, and talking money over the phone while the water is off, and nobody is going to do that. The owners telling the story land on the same figure: $200, $300 a week in found work that never hits an invoice.

The maddening part is that a rotted valve with a photo and a fair price is an easy thing to say yes to. The work was never the problem. The conversation is the problem. So we built a machine whose whole job is deleting that conversation. It's called No More Free Extras, and the name is the spec.

Here is the wiring. Every tech gets one link on his phone's home screen that lists today's jobs. Behind it sits your flat-rate extras list: the 20 found-work items your crews hit most, priced flat, built with you in a working session at onboarding. When a tech finds extra work, he taps the item and snaps a photo. Thirty seconds, no money talk.

The machine turns that tap into a plain approval note in English or Spanish, with the photo and the price. On most home jobs somebody's home, so she reads it right on the tech's phone and taps approve before a wrench is lifted, with a typed name, a timestamp, and the photo on file. When the payer is absent, you or the tech makes a live call and an emailed link becomes the record: she said yes on the phone and then tapped at 2:41. Either way, every approved extra hits the invoice with a photo and a timestamp behind it.

Connecting it to how you already assign jobs takes two to three days, whether that's bookings, missed calls, or the dispatch text you already send. At-the-door approvals work day one. Fully remote approval by text switches on in week three, because carrier registration takes about three weeks and there is no fast lane. Until then, absent payers get the live call and the emailed link.

Techs skip paperwork because it's paperwork. This is one tap and one photo, which removes the reason to skip it. If you want insurance, add a $10 to $20 spiff per approved extra, and you still keep about 90% of the margin.

Then there's the digest. At the end of the week you get one short email: extras found, by tech, with what got approved. No dashboards, nothing to log into. The crew knows the found work is counted, and the tech who spots the rotted valve stops being the only person who ever knew about it.

The price is printed: $1,497 to set up and $349 a month. Year one all-in is arithmetic, $1,497 plus 12 months at $349 comes to $5,685.

Against that, what a single extra is worth. A $200 mid-job extra leaves about $135 after the part and the tech's hour, which is almost all profit. Three approved extras a month covers the fee. One approved extra a week is $6,960 a year against $5,685 all-in, which is 1.2x in year one and 1.7x every year after, once the setup fee is behind you. Not every extra gets approved, and the break-even math absorbs that.

If you write change orders of $1,000 and up, e-signature adds about $10 a month and wires in two to three days.

Silence never approves anything. If the note sits quiet for fifteen minutes, the tech gets a nudge to ask in person, so the fail-safe is a conversation rather than a surprise on the invoice. If you want a version where no answer counts as a yes, we won't build it.

Texting is done right or not at all. A consent line rides your booking script telling customers we may text about the appointment and any work updates, including approvals, and the campaign is registered with the carriers at setup using these exact messages. Roofing change-order templates get checked against your state's statute language at setup too. That registration is also why weeks one and two run on live calls and emailed links: there is no fast lane, and we won't pretend there is.

And if your techs genuinely never find extra work mid-job, there is nothing here to approve, and you shouldn't pay $349 a month to find that out. This machine is for shops already eating found work every week.

A working session at onboarding builds your 20-item extras list. Two to three days of wiring connects your dispatch habit. Approvals at the door work day one, text approvals arrive in week three, and the weekly digest starts counting. Like everything we ship, the accounts and logins are yours from the start.