'While you're here, could you...'
Halfway through a kitchen rewire, the customer asks for two more sockets by the island and an outside light. The electrician says fine, it's a small job, does it, and moves on. Under the floor he also finds a junction box that needs sorting before he can carry on. None of it is written down.
The invoice goes out at the quoted price. When the office asks later, the electrician can't remember exactly what he added, and it feels awkward to bill the customer three weeks after the event.
Why extras disappear
Electricians are good at the work and generally dislike the paperwork. Agreeing an extra in the moment feels like good service, and stopping to write a price feels like haggling. The office only sees the original quote. Nobody makes the link unless the electrician remembers to mention it at the end of a long day.
There's also a genuine problem that some extras aren't optional: things uncovered during the work that have to be put right. Those need to be explained to the customer before the work is done, not on the invoice.
| Type of extra | How it's usually handled |
|---|---|
| Customer adds points | Agreed verbally, not priced |
| Hidden defect found | Fixed, sometimes explained, rarely priced up front |
| Access worse than expected | Absorbed as extra time |
| Materials upgrade requested | Bought, sometimes not recharged |
The office often compounds it. Seeing a job took longer than planned, they assume the electrician was slow, not that he fitted two extra circuits. The information that would explain the overrun never reached anyone who could bill it.
Where the margin goes
Unbilled extras come straight off your margin. Billing them late causes disputes because the customer remembers it as a favour. Hidden defects explained only on the invoice feel like an ambush. And your quoting never improves, because the record shows the job at the original price.
Unbilled extras also distort the picture of which jobs are profitable. A kitchen rewire that looks like it ran two days over might have been a well-run job with two days of extra work that nobody invoiced. Without that record, the next kitchen gets priced with extra days added, and you lose it to a cheaper quote.
The variation step we build
- Quick capture: on their phone, the electrician adds a variation with a short description, photo and the items or time involved.
- Pricing: the extra is priced from your standard rates, with the option to send it to the office for a price if it's unusual.
- Customer approval: the customer sees the description and price on the electrician's phone or by text, and approves with a tap. Nothing is done until they have.
- Job update: approved variations are added to the job in your job software, so the office sees them straight away.
- Invoice: the final invoice includes approved variations as separate lines, each with its approval record.
- Review: the owner can see variations by job type, which shows where original quotes keep missing things.
Extras that pay for themselves
Customers agree prices before work, so invoices don't surprise them. Electricians stop feeling awkward, because the system does the asking. The office invoices from a complete record. And patterns in variations tell you what to add to your quotes next time.
It also helps with commercial work, where variations need a written instruction. The same capture step records who asked for the change and when, which is the record a main contractor's QS will want to see.
Is this happening on your jobs?
- Extras are agreed on site and not written down.
- Invoices go out at the quoted price even when more was done.
- Customers dispute extras that appear on the invoice.
- Hidden defects are fixed before the customer has agreed a price.
- You can't tell how often jobs grow beyond the quote.