Variation & Extra Works Tracker Spreadsheet | Construction Change Order Excel Google Sheets Template | Contractor Claims Log

📐 VARIATION & EXTRA WORKS TRACKER — EXCEL AND GOOGLE SHEETS

Everybody knows they do extras. Almost nobody knows what the extras came to.

And nobody at all knows what share of them came back.

This is not an estimating question. Estimating is about the work you agreed to
do. This is about the work you never agreed to do and did anyway — and the five
separate places the money leaks out between doing it and being paid for it.

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EIGHT LINKED TABS

· Start Here — what each tab expects and where to type.
· Setup — three rates, and two lists you name yourself.
· Extra Works — one row per piece of work outside the contract.
· Where It Leaked — the five leaks, in order.
· By Who Asked — whose word is worth money and whose is not.
· Whose Change — how much of somebody else's change you paid for.
· The Paperwork — the tab that pays for the file.
· Overview — the whole year on one screen.

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FROM THE WORKED YEAR INSIDE THE FILE

Pieces of extra work 260
Hours spent on them 3,709
WHAT IT WAS ALL WORTH $329,379
What doing it cost you $212,214

What you asked for $273,793
What was agreed $191,470
What was invoiced $172,003
WHAT YOU WERE PAID $169,681
You got this much of it 51.5%
LEFT AFTER WHAT IT COST -$42,533

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FIVE LEAKS, IN ORDER

Work you never raised at all $46,005 14.0%
Raised, but for less than it was worth $9,580 2.9%
Raised, and never agreed $82,323 25.0%
Agreed, and never invoiced $19,467 5.9%
Invoiced, and never paid $2,322 0.7%

Only the last of the five ever gets chased. It was 0.7% of the money.

The first one — work that was done and never mentioned to anybody — was 14.0%.
Fifty-six pieces of work with no dispute to lose, no claim to argue and nothing
on any system, which is exactly why nobody has ever counted it.

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69.3% IN WRITING. 40.0% VERBAL. NOTHING IF NOBODY ASKED.

The same work, sorted only by whether anybody wrote it down.

Half of everything this business did outside the contract was agreed on a
scaffold, and less than half of it came back.

If the verbal and unasked-for work had recovered at the same rate as the work
somebody wrote down, the year would have been $58,670 better. That is 17.8% of
everything done outside the contract, for the price of typing it out first.

Not a rate rise. Not a better contract. Not a fight. An email before the work
starts.

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$95,357 OF SOMEBODY ELSE'S CHANGES, PAID FOR OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET

Against every kind of change there is one word: whose was it? Theirs, Ours, or
Nobody's.

Their changes were worth $200,910 and 52.5% of it came back.
Your own mistakes were worth $24,892 and 7.1% came back — which is about right.
Nobody's fault came to $103,577 and 60.2%, which comes down to your contract.

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WHOSE WORD IS WORTH MONEY

The inspector asks and you get 85.9% of it. The site manager asks on the day and
you get 45.3%. Another trade asks and you get 32.6%.

Same work, same rates, same firm, three completely different answers. Every row
gets a sentence, not a colour: their word is as good as an order · you may as
well not have bothered asking.

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WHAT YOU ACTUALLY TYPE

Eight things per extra: the job, who asked, what kind of change, when it
happened, when you raised it, the hours, the materials. Then four money columns
as they happen — asked, agreed, invoiced, paid.

What it was worth is priced from your own rates, whether or not anybody paid it.
Leave the raised-it date blank and the file counts it as never raised. That row
is not an error; it is usually the biggest line in the file.

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WHAT YOU GET

Two workbooks and a guide. One workbook has the year above already filled in, so
you can see what every column expects before you touch anything. The second is
the same file completely blank — same eight tabs, same formulas — ready for your
own extras from the first row. The guide is a plain-English PDF.

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EXCEL AND GOOGLE SHEETS

Built as .xlsx. Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, and Google Sheets through
File → Import → Upload. LibreOffice too. No macros, no add-ons, no account to
create, nothing to install, no subscription. You download a file and it is yours.

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QUESTIONS PEOPLE ACTUALLY ASK

We do not call them variations.
Call them what you like. Extras, changes, additionals, out-of-scope, day works.
The file only needs to know it was not in the contract.

We are not in construction.
It works anywhere a scope is agreed and then changes: a print works, an agency,
a machine shop, an installer, a haulier, a software team, an event company.

We never raise half of them.
Then the first pass will tell you what that half was worth, which is the whole
point. Leave the raised-it date blank and the file does the rest.

Does it write the variation for me?
No. It does not know your terms and it will not draft a notice or a claim. It
tells you what happened last year, in your own money.

Can I use it retrospectively?
Yes. Six months from memory still shows the shape, and the shape almost never
changes once you start logging properly.

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WHAT THIS IS NOT

Not a contract, a claim, a programme or a project-management system. Not
accounting, quoting or invoicing software. Not connected to anything — nothing
syncs, nothing logs in. Not legal or contractual advice, and whether you were
entitled to any of it is a question for your contract.

It will not stop anybody changing their mind. It will tell you what saying yes
without an email cost you last year.

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Sold through my Etsy shop, ThePlainLedger, so the download, the payment and the
buyer protection are all handled by Etsy. I never ask for access to anything —
no password, no project login, no accounts feed. You download a file; that is
the whole transaction.

The example business, its jobs and its figures are invented. The arithmetic
behind every figure is not.