Change Order (CO) is the mechanism to track changes in the scope of work defined in the Bill of Materials (BoM) of a project. These changes may arise due to the need to upsize or downsize the project or swap products due to suitability or unavailability.
A CO can contain addition, omission, and substitution of items that are currently in the project BoM.
Types of COs
Cloud supports the creation of two types of COs—Internal CO and External CO. When creating a CO, you can choose the appropriate CO type.
Internal COs do not need to go through the CO Proposal Acceptance process on Cloud. Once the Project Manager for the project approves the CO, the changes are factored into the project BoM.
External COs will need to be shared with the customer for review and they can approve it via the CO Proposal Acceptance process. Upon approval, the changes are factored into the BoM.
Creating the CO
COs can be created in the Project Details view or from “Project > Change Orders” in the left navigation menu.
When it comes to making changes to the items to create the CO, the CO creation experience is like the Quote creation experience.
Check out this article for more details about creating a CO.
Project Manager Approval for COs
Cloud has an intermediate, internal approval requirement for finalizing COs. The internal approver is always the Project Manager assigned to the project. To use this approval process, you need to enable the "Approve or reject change orders” permission for the Project Managers' user group under Settings > Account > User Groups & Permissions.
The Project Manager can approve the CO or reject it by adding an appropriate reason. Upon rejecting the CO, the CO creator can make changes to the CO and send it again for approval.
Check out this article for more details about Project Manager Approval for COs.
CO States
COs are tracked on Cloud from when they are created to when the customers accept them. We provide a complete set of states by default under “Settings > Projects > Change Order States.”
You have the option to customize the state labels and add more states if needed.
