Verbal instruction on Monday. Executed on Tuesday. Disputed at final account. Most variation orders that end in dispute follow that sequence, and almost none of those disputes are about whether the work was done.
The work was done. The client saw it done. What is missing is the paper: a signed instruction, an agreed value, a notice issued on time. Without those, a legitimate variation becomes a negotiation, and the contractor usually absorbs the difference.
This is not a site problem. It is a process problem that shows up on site.
On paper, a variation starts with a written instruction from the engineer or client, gets priced, gets approved, and only then gets executed. On a live project, the order is reversed. The consultant asks for a change during a site walk. The site engineer agrees because the programme cannot wait. The crew does the work that week.
The paperwork is meant to follow. Sometimes it does, a week later, in an email someone forwards to the commercial team. Sometimes it never does, because the site engineer moved on to the next problem and assumed the quantity surveyor would pick it up.
Multiply that across a project with dozens of small changes and the variation register quietly falls behind the site. By the time the commercial team reconciles it, the people who gave the instruction may have moved on and the memory of what was agreed has faded.
Under FIDIC-based contracts, which govern a large share of projects in the UAE and KSA, timing is not a formality. ICC’s explainer on claims under FIDIC 2017 sets out that a notice of claim must be given within 28 days of the contractor becoming aware of the event, and that missing the deadline can cost the contractor its entitlement. A fully detailed claim then follows within 84 days.
Twenty-eight days is a short window when the instruction was verbal and the paperwork lives in someone’s inbox. A contractor who discovers the gap at final account is usually months past it.
UAE courts and tribunals also give real weight to contemporaneous written records. We covered how that plays out in our piece on why construction companies are always in firefighting mode. A WhatsApp message and a site engineer’s recollection rarely carry the weight of a signed instruction with a date on it.
The direct cost is the unpaid work. Labour, materials and plant that went into a change nobody can prove was instructed. On a single project it can look like a rounding error. Across a portfolio it is margin.
The indirect cost is worse. Unrecorded variations distort the budget. Cost reports show overruns on packages that actually grew in scope, so the project team chases the wrong problem. It is one of the quiet drivers behind why construction projects go over budget, and it rarely gets named as such.
Then there is leverage. A contractor negotiating a final account with a clean variation register is presenting facts. A contractor reconstructing it from memory is asking for goodwill.
Goodwill is a weak position on a project that already ran late. The client’s commercial team has its own records, its own consultant and every incentive to treat any gap in the contractor’s records as a gap in the claim.
The fix is not more discipline from site engineers who are already stretched. It is making the record the easiest thing to create. The instruction is logged on site, on a phone, the day it is given, with photos and the name of the person who gave it. The commercial team sees it the same day, prices it, and the notice clock starts from a timestamp rather than a guess.
That is what construction ERP built for the site looks like. Mismar works with contractors across UAE and KSA to capture variations when they happen, not at final account. If your variation register is running behind your site, let’s get on a call.
Start growing with Mismar today.
