Agreed on the drive, forgotten by Friday
The quote assumed the cable would go through the garage. On the day, the garage turns out to be full floor to ceiling, so the fitter clips it round the outside of the house instead. Extra cable, extra clips, an extra hour. He mentions it to the customer, who says fine. He mentions it to nobody else.
The office invoices the quoted price. Or the office hears later, adds the extra, and the customer, who remembers saying fine to something much smaller, disputes it. Either way, the margin on that job is gone, and the fitter has learned that raising extras causes arguments.
No route from the driveway to the invoice
Fitters are not bad at spotting extras. They are good at it, because they are the ones doing the extra work. What is missing is a quick, agreed way of recording one. Phoning the office from a customer's drive is awkward, the paper job sheet does not have a box for it, and the invoice is raised from the quote because that is the only priced document anyone has.
- Fitters do not know the price of an extra, so they cannot tell the customer.
- The customer's agreement is verbal and nobody writes it down.
- Extras arrive in the office as a scribble, a text or not at all.
- Invoices are raised from the accepted quote without checking the job notes.
- Grant-funded jobs complicate who pays for what, so extras get dropped to keep things simple.
What it does to margins and trust
Unbilled extras are pure cost: materials and time given away. Disputed extras cost more, because they eat office time and sour a review. Over a season the pattern also skews your pricing data, because the quote says the job went as planned when it did not. The next quote for a similar house is priced from the wrong history.
The variation step we add
- The fitter's job app gets an Add Variation button. They pick from your standard extras (cable per metre, surface route, post mount, extra enclosure, groundworks) or describe something non-standard.
- Standard items are priced from the same price book the quote used. Non-standard ones can be sent to the office for a price in real time, with photos attached.
- The customer sees a short summary on the fitter's phone or tablet: what changed, why, and the added cost. They sign on screen or accept by a link sent to their phone.
- If the customer declines, that is recorded too, along with what the fitter did instead.
- Agreed variations are added to the job, and the final invoice in Xero, QuickBooks or your job software includes them automatically.
- The office gets a weekly list of variations by type, which feeds back into how surveys and quotes are written.
| Step | Current habit | With the variation step |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing the extra | Fitter guesses or avoids it | From your price book, on the phone |
| Customer agreement | Verbal, unrecorded | Signed summary with photos |
| Telling the office | Text or nothing | Added to the job automatically |
| Invoicing | From the quote only | Quote plus agreed variations |
| Learning from it | Nobody looks | Variation report feeds the price book |
A driveway conversation that ends cleanly
Fitters can raise an extra without feeling like salesmen, because the price is not theirs and the customer sees exactly what they are agreeing to. The office invoices what was done. Disputes become rare, and when one happens the signed summary and photos are on the job. After a few months the variation report shows which extras keep appearing, and the survey starts catching them before install day.
Checklist: are extras leaking?
- Fitters often do more than the quote and say nothing.
- Customers have disputed an extra they remember differently.
- Invoices are raised from the quote without reading the job notes.
- You have no list of extras from last month.
- The same unpriced work turns up on job after job.