Variations
Small extras keep eating the job. How do I stop doing them for free?
The extra socket, the moved door swing, the deeper footing nobody could have known about. Each one is twenty minutes or two hundred pounds, each feels too small to invoice, and by the final account they are the difference between the margin you priced and the one you got.
QScope Team·15 July 2026·4 min read
Do the arithmetic once, honestly, for your last finished job: every small change you did without paperwork, at what it would have billed. Most builders who try this land somewhere between two and five per cent of the contract value, given away in pieces too small to fight for. This page is about the pieces.
Why small extras die unbilled
Not because the client refuses to pay, mostly they were never asked, but because of three quiet mechanics: the conversation feels disproportionate (raising £180 mid-handshake feels petty), the moment passes (unrecorded today, unprovable next month), and the client’s mental model resets (each freebie teaches that small changes are included, so the asks grow). The cure has to attack all three at once, which is why it is a habit and a clause, not a resolution to be braver.
The three-sentence habit
Same message, every time, sent the same day, from the van:
“Happy to do that. It is extra work, so it will be about £180 plus VAT, and it will go on the next invoice. Say yes and I will crack on tomorrow.”
Notice what those sentences do: the price arrives before the work (no ambush later), the reply is the client’s written yes (a record with a date it did not choose), and the billing route is named so the invoice line surprises nobody. It is the confirmed instruction shrunk to its minimum viable size, and “about” is doing honest work: small extras need a rough figure now, not a quotation on Thursday, the pricing machinery exists for the ones big enough to deserve it.
The clause that makes it expected
The habit lands better when the quote predicted it, one line in the terms you write at the start: “Changes and additions, however small, are confirmed by message with a price before they are done, and added to the next invoice.” Now the three sentences are the system working as described, not a builder suddenly turning formal, and the client who agreed the clause in month one cannot be wounded by it in month four. This works identically for a homeowner and a business client; nothing here leans on the Construction Act, so section 106 changes nothing, it is contract and habit all the way down.
The trap on the other side: do not weaponise it
The habit is for capturing real extras, not for converting every clarification into a charge. A client who feels nickel-and-dimed stops saying yes to anything, and whether something is actually extra or was always in the scope is a real question deserving a real answer. Charge cleanly for genuine changes, absorb genuine ambiguities you created, and say which is which: that is the version of this policy that survives a whole job.
What to do this week
1. Save the three sentences as a message template on your phone, today, with the blanks marked.
2. Sweep the live job for small extras already done and unbilled, and put the recoverable ones in the next application while memories are warm.
3. Add the one-line clause to your quote template for every job that starts from now.
Where the information stops
A pile of small unconfirmed extras on a job that has now gone sour is a different problem from the one this page prevents, part evidence, part negotiation, and whether to fight for it or fold it into the final account conversation is a judgement call about the whole relationship, not about any single socket.