Contracts & change orders

What this covers

A job is agreed at a number, and then the work meets the building. A client changes their mind, a wall opens up and reveals rot, a fixture is discontinued. Every one of those has to be priced, agreed, and reflected in what gets billed.

This area is how a change becomes an agreed change rather than a surprise on an invoice.

The contract

A Contract is a signed agreement inside a Project Record. It is drafted and edited outside KI and uploaded as a PDF; KI captures the signature against that PDF and records what is needed to make it valid.

A Legacy KI “Project” is a KI Contract — one of the three renames worth learning properly (section 4.1).

A project here carries one Construction Contract. There is no design engagement, so there is no Design Contract, and there is no Client Portal on this instance — nothing is signed in a portal.

The Contract Activation Sequence

Signing is the first of four steps, and the other three are what make the contract usable:

Sign the contract.
Set up Billing Items — how the contract will be billed. They must sum to the contract amount, and one of them is the deposit.
Set up the budget — the initial Budget Adjustment by Cost Code. Cost Code budgets plus Fee must equal the contract amount.
Bill the deposit — create a Pay Application and submit the invoice.

The four-step sequence as documented is the Admin Portal and Client Portal flow, which this instance does not run. The objects and the balancing rules behind it are the same here; how the sequence is ordered in Legacy KI is not written down yet. See section 8.

Billing Items is what commercial contracting calls a schedule of values — the contract broken into billable line items, which progress billing is measured against.

Change orders

A change order is a priced change to a signed contract. It carries matching Billing Item and Budget Adjustment changes, so three things move together and stay reconciled: the contract amount, what the client will be billed, and what the project is planned to cost.

A change is worked up as a Change Estimate first — priced, and where a subcontractor is involved priced against their number — and only becomes a Change Order once it is agreed. Change Estimates share the Issues screen on the Legacy KI menu.

Pricing before commitment is the point: a change is negotiable while it is an estimate, and binding once it is an order.

The Change Estimate log

The Issues screen produces a grouped Change Estimate log, on screen and as a PDF, with a project’s estimates gathered under their status: Unsubmitted, Pending, Disputed, Approved, Executed, Rejected.

Until 3 September 2026 that report built its status headings from the number of estimates on the project rather than from the estimates themselves, so a project with fewer than six numbered Change Estimates dropped whichever statuses fell past its count. A project with two estimates got at most two status groups, and any estimate filed under a third was absent from both the screen and the PDF with nothing to mark the gap. Projects with six or more estimates were unaffected, which is why the problem went unnoticed.

A grouped log pulled before that date cannot be assumed complete. Pull it again if it was sent to a client or used to settle a number.

Someone has to be accountable

A change order cannot be created until a client contact is identified as the change order approver on the project. This is deliberate: nothing is billed on the strength of a conversation, and no change is issued without a named person accountable for agreeing to it.

How a change order moves the budget

A budget does not grow because someone decided it should. It grows because scope was priced, agreed, and signed, and the contract value moved with it.

That is enforced arithmetically. A change order Budget Adjustment must total the amount of the selected Change Order, and a change order Billing Item change must net to the same amount — where an internal adjustment on either side must net to zero. The rules are in section 5.

Part 2 — Objects and rules — the arithmetic behind all of this
Billing and accounting — how Billing Items turn into a pay application
Budgets and cost control — the cost side a change order adjusts