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What is a change order?

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Answer

A Change Order (CO) is a written record of a contract modification that details any amendment(s) to the original agreement's scope of work. Most construction contracts are executed with a clearly defined scope of work, so any work that is added,  substituted or deleted from the original contract's scope (such as changes to a project's designs, conditions, schedules and/or costs) will typically require an approved change order. 

Over the course of a construction project, there are a wide variety of reasons that can lead to the requirement for a change order. Change orders might also be initiated by either the project owner or a contractor. 

Examples

Below are examples of common reasons that result in the need to create a change order over the course of a project:

  • Design changes
  • Drawing errors and omissions
  • Inaccurate or incomplete specifications
  • Unexpected job site conditions
  • Material and crew substitutions

In a Procore project,  users who have been granted the appropriate permissions in Procore have the ability to create a change order for either a commitment and/or for a prime contract. In addition, the steps required to create a change order depend on your project's configuration settings:

  • Is the Change Events tool enabled or disabled?
    If the Change Events tool is enabled on a Procore project, you will be required to create a change event before you can create a change order. If the Change Events tool is disabled, you are not required to create a change event first. This decision to enable or disable the Change Events tool is typically made by company's Procore Administrator or a Project Manager/Project Engineer. 
  • How are change order tiers configured on your project's tools? 
    The number of steps required to create a change order also depend upon the configuration settings of the Commitments and Prime Contracts tools. To learn more about how these tool can be configured in Procore, see What are the different change order tiers?

See Also

Learn how to manage your change orders in Procore: Change Orders

If you would like to learn more about Procore’s change order software and how it can help your business, please visit our construction change order product page here.