Getting extras in writing before the crew does the work

The GC catches your lead man in the hallway during rough-in. “While your guys are in that wall, run me a dedicated circuit for the island. And add a couple of recessed cans over the sink, would you.” Your lead nods, because that is what you do on a job that is moving. The conduit gets bent, the wire gets pulled, the work gets done. Nobody wrote anything down.

Six weeks later the invoice goes out with the island circuit and the two cans on it, and the GC calls: he never approved that, or he meant the cheap cans, or it was supposed to be part of the base bid. Now you are arguing over money for work that is already buried behind drywall, and the only record of the conversation is two different memories of a hallway. That is not a billing problem. It is a scope problem that started the second your lead man nodded, and it is one of the most common ways small shops lose money they already earned, which is why getting paid on proof starts with getting the extra in writing.

Why verbal extras cost electricians the most

Every trade eats some verbal extras, but electrical gets hit harder than most, for two plain reasons. Your changes hide fast: an added circuit is invisible the day the insulation goes in, so you cannot point at it later the way a tile guy can point at a floor. And your extras are small and constant. It is rarely one big change order. It is a dedicated circuit here, a couple of cans there, a whip for the disposal the plumber sprung on everyone, ten or twelve of these across a job, each one small enough that nobody stops to write it up.

Add them together and the number is not small. Say your crew does two verbal extras a week that never make it onto an invoice, and call each one a modest 175 dollars in labor and material. That is 350 a week, and across a working year it is a little over 18,000 dollars in work you did and gave away. You did not lose a bid for that money. You earned it and then let it evaporate in a hallway. This is the same gap verbal change orders open in every trade, just faster and more often on an electrical job.

The discipline, sized for a small shop

You do not need a project-management department to fix this. You need one rule that everyone on the truck knows: no extra work starts until the ask is written, priced, and approved. Three parts, in order.

Written scope. The verbal ask becomes a plain line before anyone touches it: “Add one 20A dedicated circuit for kitchen island, home run to panel B.” Not a paragraph. One sentence a green apprentice could read back correctly.

A price. A number attached to that line, even a rough one. “Add circuit, material and labor, 240 dollars.” The GC gets to see the cost before he says yes, which is the whole point. Half the fights are not about whether the work happened, they are about a customer who pictured a smaller bill than the one that came.

An approval before the bend. Someone with authority to spend the GC’s money says yes to that line, in writing, before your crew starts. If the answer is not yes yet, the work waits. That is the part that feels hard on a fast job, and it is the part that saves you the five-figure argument.

The trap small shops fall into is thinking this slows the job down. It does not. The written scope takes about as long as the verbal one did. What it removes is the week of back-and-forth at invoice time, which is the expensive part.

The change-order line, filled in

Here is the shape of the whole thing on one hallway ask, so you can see it is three lines, not a form.

The GC says: run me a dedicated circuit for the island and add two cans over the sink. Your lead types back, right there:

• Extra to base scope: (1) 20A dedicated circuit for kitchen island, home run to panel B. (2) two 4-inch recessed cans over sink, on existing kitchen circuit.
• Price: 240 for the circuit, 180 for the two cans, 420 total, T&M if it grows.
• Reply “approved” to start. Work holds until then.

The GC reads it, thumbs back “approved,” and now the crew can bend conduit knowing the money is real. When the invoice goes out six weeks later, that line is sitting there with the word approved next to it and a name and a date. There is nothing to argue about, because the argument already happened before the work, which is the only time an argument about scope is cheap. This is the same logic behind a clean T&M ticket that actually makes the GC’s invoice: the paper exists because it was made at the moment of the ask, not reconstructed from memory at the end.

Where the ask should land

The reason verbal extras win is that writing them up has always been more work than just doing them. The fix is to make writing the ask down easier than not.

That is the piece Crewmigo is built to carry. The GC’s ask lands as a task on that job’s thread: the scope line, the price, and a photo of the spot if the crew needs it. The approval is the button, and it moves by rank. Your lead marks the extra ready, the GC or the person holding the budget hits Approve, and only then does the crew work it. The ask, the price, and the yes all live on the same task, with a name and a date, so when the invoice gets built there is no scrolling a group text trying to remember who agreed to what. The record follows the job, not the lead man’s memory, which matters most on the day the trim-out is done across two floors and nobody can recall which of the four extras the GC actually signed off on.

We are new, so put one job on it and watch what happens to the extras. The work your crew already does gets written down before it disappears into a wall, and the conversation nobody could quote later becomes a line nobody can argue with.