After both parties for a particular subcontract order have agreed the details of variation requests, contractors can raise variation orders to incorporate those variation requests into the new gross order value.
If you need to check how to raise a variation request first, check out our help article here
Although raising and approving variation requests will allow the subcontractor party to apply for additional works on a subcontractor order, it can be important to still raise a variation order at regular intervals. Reasons may include:
Some contractors may be configured to only allow payments under or equal to the gross order value.
Some contractors ERP systems are integrated with WebContractor, and will be updated by raising a variation order.
Helps enable consistent cash flow reporting for commercial teams.
If you've decided you need to raise a variation order, you just need to follow a few simple steps:
On an order with approved variation requests, hover your mouse cursor over the "Actions" button in the top right hand corner of the screen and select "Add Variation Order":
This will open up a menu to input the details of the variation order. The new gross order value and gross increase will be calculated from the approved variation requests, and a summary including a breakdown per variation request as the "reason for increase":
You will need to remember to update the Tender Allowance and upload a pdf document to substantiate the variation request.
Once you're happy with the variation order, you'll just need to click the "Submit for Approval" button in the top right hand corner of the page:
The Variation order will then go up the chain of approval at the contractor and update the gross order value.
Keeping track of Variation Requests
As both the contractor and subcontractor add various variation requests to an order, and those variations are either approved, rejected, or marked as on account, it can get confusing keeping track of which variation requests have been taken into account in the gross order value.
WebContractor has a "Variation Register" tab on both subcontract order and project pages to make managing and tracking variation requests more streamlined.
On the subcontract orders and projects you should see a tab along the top of the page called "Variation Register".
Subcontract orders:
Projects:
These registers can be filtered to help you identify where you orders and projects may have outstanding costs not yet factored into your gross order values. For example, we could filter for approved variation requests not yet included in variation orders like so:
