What belongs in a variation register?

A register earns its keep only if it can answer three questions instantly: what is agreed, what is pending and what is at risk. That takes more than a description and a number per change. It needs the instruction reference, the document or confirmation that created the change, so it traces to an authority rather than a memory. It needs a status, instructed, priced, submitted, agreed, so anyone can see how far along it is without opening the file. It needs a value, the agreed figure where there is one and your honest current assessment marked as an assessment where there is not, because a change with no number is one nobody can claim. And it needs its notice position: whether any time or notice window attaches, and whether the notice has been served, because a variation worth money and out of time is worth much less. Add the date each thing happened, keep it in one document rather than scattered across emails, and reconcile it against the payment application every month so the register and the account never drift apart. Narrative does not belong: the register is a control document, not a diary, and the moment it fills with commentary nobody keeps it current. Kept lean and live, it turns change from an argument waiting to happen into an account both sides already recognise.

Take a groundworks subcontractor on an NEC job where change is tracked in a running email thread titled variations, latest at the top. Everyone can find the last instruction; nobody can tell you the total value of change outstanding, which ones have been agreed, or whether the early-warning windows on two of them were ever met. At the final account the main contractor produces a clean schedule of what was instructed, and the subcontractor spends three weeks reconstructing from the thread what was priced, what was paid and what was simply lost. The fix on the next job is a single sheet: each change a row, columns for instruction reference, status, value, notice position and date, reconciled to the application every month. By completion the register and the account agree to the pound, and the final account is a half-day check rather than a three-week excavation.