The register is empty and the job is half built

The job is months in and the changes are everywhere: revised drawings, instructions buried in emails, work done on a say-so at the morning meeting. What does not exist is a list. Nobody can say how many variations there are, which have been instructed in writing, which have been priced, and which have been agreed. Every valuation is argued from memory, and every month the memories get worse.

Variation money moves along a chain: an instruction, a record of the work, a price, an agreement. A register is where the chain lives. Without one, each application carries the same unpriced changes forward to sort out later, and later has a habit of arriving at the final account, where the work is buried, the people have moved on, and the leverage of a live job has gone.

A register can be rebuilt mid-job, and it is worth doing properly once: the drawing registers, instructions, emails and minutes swept for every change, each one listed with its paper status, what is instructed, what is priced, what is agreed, what is missing. From that day the account has a spine, and the arguments shrink to the items that genuinely need arguing.