Construction Construction Control
Approved change orders not billed: how to check your records before you submit the pay app
Construction Control · a manual method first, then a live demo of one check, then exactly what the workbook automates — and what it does not.
Skip to the live demo — Step 4, running on sample data in this page.
An approved change order can miss a pay application without anyone deciding to leave it out. The approval sits in the change order log, the billing is built in a separate spreadsheet, and the step of comparing the two can belong to nobody. This page shows a manual way to run that comparison, then says exactly what the Construction Control workbook automates and what it does not.
The manual check
Step 1: Put three lists side by side. T&M tickets, change order requests (CORs) marked pending or approved, and your pay-app schedule of values (SOV).
Step 2: Tie every ticket to a COR. List any ticket not linked to a COR, any ticket entered twice, and any ticket missing its date, scope, labor hours, or loaded hourly rate. A ticket with no COR has no change order to be billed under.
Step 3: Confirm each COR has backup recorded. Flag any COR with no backup recorded against it. This checks that backup is recorded in your records. It does not judge whether the backup is any good.
Step 4: Find each approved COR on the SOV. An approved COR with no SOV line is a candidate for "approved but not billed." Watch how identifiers are typed: "COR-014", "COR 014" and "COR-014 " (trailing space) are different text to a formula. The workbook ignores upper and lower case but treats extra spaces as differences, so a stray space can make a line look missing when it is there. Review every flag by hand. The live demo below runs exactly this step.
Step 5: Compare amounts, not just presence. A change order can be on the SOV and still be billed at a different amount than was approved. For each approved COR that is on the SOV, compare the approved value with the cumulative amount billed to date. The presence check in Step 4 does not tell you about an underbilled line, so this is a separate step.
Step 6: Treat pending requests separately. Compare each pending COR with its tickets for discrepancies. Pending is not approved. The workbook does not add pending change orders to billing or decide whether they are payable.
Try Step 4 now — the EX-06 demo
One COR per line: ID, amount, status (spaces after commas are fine). Preloaded with synthetic sample data — fictional IDs and amounts.
One SOV COR ID per line, taken exactly as typed — spaces count. In the sample below, the COR-103 line deliberately ends with a trailing space, and COR-104 / COR-105 do not appear at all.
Press Run EX-06 check to evaluate the data above.
The workbook version
Construction Control runs Steps 2–6 as seven checks (duplicate tickets, missing fields, unlinked tickets, COR without backup, pending COR vs ticket mismatch, approved COR missing from the SOV, approved vs billed cumulative) in a macro-free Excel workbook. One-time $39, no subscription. Get the workbook on Payhip.
What it does not do
It checks the records you enter. It cannot tell whether a ticket, approval, or backup document is genuine. It does not capture field tickets or signatures, run approvals, price change orders, calculate retainage, generate G702/G703 forms, or flag change orders billed before approval. It does not make a GC pay faster or accept a pay app. The missing-fields check covers only four fields: date, scope, labor hours, and loaded $/hr. The "Prior completed $" column is typed in by hand. Requires desktop Excel. Recalculated and verified in LibreOffice; that does not establish full compatibility or ongoing support. Google Sheets has not been verified.
Honest limitations.
- Matching is space-sensitive, with no trimming. Matching follows the workbook: case-insensitive (SOV cor-102 matches register COR-102) — but a stray trailing space on an SOV ID makes that line count as absent, so the Approved COR flags for its full amount.
- EX-06 evaluates Approved CORs only. A Pending COR never flags here, whether or not it appears on the SOV.
- One edge differs: an ID containing * or ? is compared here as plain text, while the workbook's formula reads those characters as wildcards. This page demos one of the Construction Control workbook's seven checks (EX-06); the full workbook runs in Excel with all seven checks plus the exception report, and this demo's matching behavior was verified against the workbook under LibreOffice recalc (desktop-Excel recalc confirmation is still pending).