How to Route Change Orders to the Right Approver
A change order on the wrong desk gets built before it's approved. Here's how to route approvals by authority so nothing gets done for free.
A change order sitting on the wrong person's desk is a change order that gets built before it is approved. The fix is not a faster signer. It is routing each change to the person actually allowed to approve it, automatically, before the crew starts. Here is how to set that up.
One note up front on where this lives: HubSpot tracks the deal, not the field change. Capturing a change on site and routing its approval is a field platform's job. ServiceIQ handles change orders and approval at its Enterprise tier, and other field systems do too. This guide is about the process, whichever platform you run it in.
Decide who approves what
Before any routing, write down your approval authority. Most contractors route on two things:
Dollar threshold. A $500 change and a $50,000 change should not need the same signature. Set bands, and name who owns each.
Type. A scope change the owner requested routes to the owner. A field condition routes to the PM or the GC. A design change may route to the architect.
If this is not written down, every change gets routed to whoever is standing closest, which is how the wrong person ends up approving work they cannot authorize.
Capture the change where it happens
Routing only works if the change is captured the moment it occurs, in the field, not reconstructed from memory a week later. The record needs the scope, the reason, a rough price, and who identified it. A change captured on site with that detail can be routed in minutes. A change that lives in a text message cannot be routed at all.
Route by authority, not availability
With thresholds and types defined, the routing is mechanical: the captured change goes to the person your rules say owns it, with the detail they need to decide. The point is that the routing follows the authority, not the org chart's availability. The $50,000 change does not get approved by a PM because the owner was hard to reach that day.
Connect approval to billing
Approval is not the finish line. An approved change that never reaches the schedule of values never gets billed, and you did the work for free. Wire the approval so that once it is signed, the change flows into the contract value and onto the next pay application automatically. That connection is the whole reason to route cleanly in the first place.
Keep an audit trail
Record who approved what, when, and at what price, with the signature attached. On commercial work, the change order is a contract document, and eight months later a dispute over an amount should be answered from a record, not an argument from memory. Every step, captured with a timestamp.
How to check you got it right
Pick last month's change orders and trace three things for each: was it captured in the field or reconstructed later, did it route to the person actually authorized for that amount, and did it reach an invoice. If any one of those breaks, that is the step to fix. Most contractors find the break is between approval and billing, not in the signing.
Related: Change order management: how contractors stop the leak.