Found Rot at Two O'Clock? Nothing Else Happens Until It's Signed

On the list of fires: “the change order nobody signed”

Module 6 · The Money System · Play 17 of 22

The problem in one breath

Tear-off is half done and the crew finds rotten decking, or a second layer nobody counted. Your foreman does the right thing and fixes it. Nobody writes anything down. Then the final invoice goes out, the homeowner says "I never agreed to that," and he's right — nothing on paper says he did.

Why it happens

The money that leaks out of a roof usually isn't the price you quoted. It's the work you did after the quote and never put on paper. Mid-tear-off is the worst moment for paperwork: the deck is open, weather is coming, six men are standing there. So the foreman handles it, means to mention it, and by the time anybody talks money the work is under new shingles. Now you're asking a homeowner to pay for something he can't see and never approved, on the day he writes his biggest check. He digs in.

The play

Standing rule: nothing extra starts until the change order is signed. Not "bill it later" — signed first, then the crew swings. The foreman's job in that moment is to stop, not to swallow it. Say it out loud to every foreman, so stopping never looks slow.
The pad lives in the truck, and the foreman fills it on the tailgate. With the homeowner right there, before the work: what we found, why it has to be done, what we'll do, the price, the new contract total, signature, date. Two minutes on a tailgate beats two weeks of arguing by text.
Price it off numbers you set in advance. Nobody invents a price standing in a driveway. Set your per-sheet decking price and your per-square second-layer price before the season, off the cost math in Play 06, and name them as unit prices in the contract the homeowner already signed (Play 18). Then the tailgate number isn't a negotiation — it's his own number, counted out.
Photograph it before it gets covered. Close enough to see the rot, wide enough to prove it's that roof — the photo habit. A photo and a signature together end the argument before it starts.
Draw a dollar line for the foreman. Under it he signs the change order himself and keeps the job moving. Over it he calls you. That line belongs on the authority sheet with a real number on it, not "use your judgment."
Log it the day it's signed, then bill it. A photo of the signed page goes to the office that same day. The log's whole job is catching the one that got signed on a tailgate and never made it onto an invoice — earned money sitting in a truck door.
On an insurance job, the extra goes to the carrier first. Rot found mid-tear-off on a storm roof is a supplement to the claim (Play 08) before it's ever a change order to the homeowner. What a policy pays for is the carrier's answer, not yours — ask which pocket this comes out of before you promise anybody anything (Play 13). If the answer comes back no, it's the homeowner's money, and it gets signed the same way.

Whether an extra has to be in writing to be collectible, and what your state requires a home-improvement contract to carry, is your state's call and your contract's. Read yours, then ask your attorney.

Do this this week

Set one number: what you charge to replace a single sheet of decking, worked out from your own costs. Write it on the pad below and print a stack for the trucks. Twenty minutes, and no foreman ever guesses a price in a driveway again.

The tool

Get the sheet Get the card file

Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice. Grab it on the phone now — it’ll be waiting on the computer at the shop.

Two pieces: a pad for the truck, and a log for the office. The card below is the pad — print it, keep a stack in every truck, and the foreman fills one out on the tailgate before the work starts. A Spanish twin lives on the Spanish cards page.

the-change-order-log.xlsx is the change-order log: one row per change order, with the price, whether it's signed, billed and paid, and one name chasing it. A flag column shouts NOT SIGNED — STOP when work is happening with nothing signed, and SIGNED, NOT BILLED when money is sitting on a tailgate copy instead of an invoice. A small box adds up both piles. See the sheet notes below.

CHANGE ORDER — signed on the tailgate, before the work

Job / address: _______________________________________________
Homeowner: ___________________________  Date: ________________
Foreman: _____________________________  Job #: _______________

WHAT WE FOUND (be specific - count it, measure it)
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

WHY IT HAS TO BE DONE
______________________________________________________________

WHAT WE WILL DO
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

Photos taken before it gets covered?   [ ] Yes   [ ] No

PRICE
  Unit price from the contract   $ ________ x ________ (qty)
  Other                          $ ________
  PRICE OF THIS CHANGE           $ ________

  Contract total before          $ ________
  NEW CONTRACT TOTAL             $ ________

No other terms change. Everything else in the signed contract -
price, schedule, scope, warranty - stays exactly as it is.

The crew does not restart this work until both signatures are on
this page.

Homeowner: __________________________  Date: ________________
Foreman:   __________________________  Date: ________________

Homeowner gets a photo or a copy of this page. Photograph the
signed page and send it to the office the same day.

If your crew is 1099

You can't stand over a true sub and make him fill out your form — that's bossing him like an employee. Put it in the agreement instead: no extra work gets performed or billed to you without a change order signed by the homeowner and your written OK first. Getting that signature stays yours — the contract with the homeowner is yours. For the sub it's a billing term, not a rule about how he runs his men.

One more thing: this play is how we run a shop — it's not legal advice. Rules change by state and by contract, so before you act on the legal-sounding parts, run them past your own attorney or accountant. It's your business, and what you do with any of this is your call and your responsibility.

M6-17 · Found Rot at Two O'Clock? Nothing Else Happens Until It's Signed — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/money-system/the-change-order

The sheet notes

How the sheet works — the columns and the formulas

The columns, the formulas behind them, and the judgment calls — so you can rebuild it by hand if you ever need to.

What it does

One row per change order. You put in the job, what the crew found, the price, and three Yes/No answers — signed, billed, paid — and the sheet flags the two ways a change order costs you money: NOT SIGNED — STOP when work is happening with no signature behind it, and SIGNED, NOT BILLED when the homeowner agreed to pay and nobody put it on an invoice. The box at the top right adds up both piles in dollars, so you can see in one glance what's exposed and what's uncollected.

Row 5 is filled in as an example. Delete it before you log your first real change order.

How to use it

A row gets written the moment the crew finds something extra — not after it's fixed, and not at invoice time. If the row exists and Signed? isn't Yes, the sheet is telling you the crew should be standing still.
Price $ is the price of the change itself, not the new contract total. The pad on the play carries the new total for the homeowner; the log tracks the extra.
Set Signed?, Billed? and Paid? from the dropdowns. They only take Yes or No, and the cell refuses anything else. Don't paste values into those columns — pasting skips the check, and anything that isn't exactly Yes counts as No and drops the row into the wrong pile.
Date signed comes off the signed copy, not off memory. Blank means nobody signed anything.
Put a real person in Who's chasing it. One name, not "the office."
Read the sheet at the money meeting (Play 01). Anything amber is money you've already earned and agreed on — it just needs an invoice. Once it's billed, the unpaid balance is the money-owed list's job, not this sheet's.

Columns

Column	What it is
A Job / address	Which roof. The name the office already calls the job.
B Date found	The day the crew found it.
C What it was	The extra, counted or measured — "9 sheets rotten decking, north slope", not "extra work".
D Price $	The price of this change on its own. You type it.
E Signed?	Yes / No dropdown. Yes only when a signed copy exists.
F Date signed	The date on the signed copy.
G Billed?	Yes / No dropdown. Yes once it's on an invoice the homeowner has.
H Paid?	Yes / No dropdown. Tracked here so a closed job reads closed.
I Who's chasing it	One name.
J Flag	Auto: NOT SIGNED — STOP (red) when Signed? isn't Yes, SIGNED, NOT BILLED (amber) when it's signed but not billed, blank when it's clean.

Box on the right: three labels in L4:L6 — Change orders on the list, Signed, not billed ($), Not signed ($) — with their numbers next to them in M4, M5 and M6.

The rows run 5 to 24 — twenty change orders.

Formulas (so you can rebuild it by hand)

Flag (J5, fill down to J24): =IF($A5="","",IF($E5<>"Yes","NOT SIGNED — STOP",IF($G5<>"Yes","SIGNED, NOT BILLED",""))) The first test is the blank-row guard: no job in column A, no flag.
Change orders on the list (M4): =COUNTA($A$5:$A$24)
Signed, not billed ($) (M5): =SUMIF($J$5:$J$24,"SIGNED, NOT BILLED",$D$5:$D$24)
Not signed ($) (M6): =SUMIF($J$5:$J$24,"NOT SIGNED — STOP",$D$5:$D$24)
The colours are conditional formatting, not formulas in a cell. Two rules on J5:J24: red fill on =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("STOP",$J5)), amber fill on =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("NOT BILLED",$J5)).
The dropdowns are data validation on E5:E24, G5:G24 and H5:H24 — a Yes/No list set to reject anything else outright, because one typo drops a row out of both dollar totals.

Only IF, COUNTA, SUMIF, ISNUMBER and SEARCH are used, so it opens and computes in old Excel, Numbers, and LibreOffice. (Verified: opened and recalculated in LibreOffice — the example row flags SIGNED, NOT BILLED; a row with nothing signed flags NOT SIGNED — STOP; a row that's signed and billed leaves the flag blank; empty rows stay empty.)

Notes and judgment calls

Blank in Signed? counts as not signed, on purpose. The sheet assumes the worst until a signature exists, because that's the expensive direction to be wrong in.
The flag order is deliberate. Not signed outranks not billed. An unsigned extra can cost you the whole amount plus the argument; an unbilled one is money you've already agreed on and only have to invoice.
Paid? doesn't drive the flag. Once a change order is billed, chasing the payment belongs on the money-owed list at Play 01, where every unpaid invoice already lives. The Paid? column is here so a finished job reads finished.
On a storm job, think twice before a row goes here at all. Extra work found mid-job on an insurance roof usually belongs in the supplement worksheet at Play 08, because the carrier owes it, not the homeowner. A change order billed to a homeowner for something his policy covers is a fight you'll lose twice.
The example row is nine sheets of decking at $675, signed the same day it was found and not yet billed — so it lands in the amber pile and the box reads one change order, $675 signed but not billed, $0 not signed. Real numbers are yours; this sheet prices nothing.
Whether a signature is what makes an extra collectible is your state's and your contract's call. The log exists so you always have one, not because it can tell you what your paperwork has to say.
The list stops at row 24. Every box formula reads rows 5 through 24 only, so a change order typed on row 25 is invisible to the totals while the sheet still looks right. Add rows by right-clicking inside the block and choosing Insert.
The sheet ships with its numbers already saved in it, so a phone preview shows real figures; they recalculate the moment you type.

The one thing

Do this this week

Take it with you

Get the sheet Get the card file

One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.

Same fire

Jobs sell but the profit isn't there

M6-06price to a profit
M6-04the pre-bid challenge
M6-07the payment schedule
M6-10earned vs. billed
M6-17the change order nobody signed — you’re here
M6-19grade the job after the last check

All the fires →

Fixed this?

Half of “no profit” is profit you earned and never collected.

The fire right behind it is usually Owed money you can't collect.