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Variation Order Tracker for Live Jobs

Example prompt: "When an email arrives at variations@ourdomain.com with a subject like 'VAR: [job name] — [short description]', read the body and identify the change of scope, materials needed, labour rough estimate, and any timeline impact. Look up the job in the 'Live Jobs' tab of our jobs Google Sheet to get the customer details, the agreed contract value, and the running variations total. Generate a Variation Order document in Google Docs from our standard template — variation number, description, price, agreed timeline impact, terms, and a signature box — and save it to the job's folder in Google Drive. Append a row to the 'Variations' tab on the job sheet with the number, date, description, value, and status 'Pending sign-off'. Draft an email in Gmail to the customer with the variation attached, asking them to reply 'agreed' or sign and return before we proceed. Post a message in #jobs on Slack with the job name, the variations total to date as a percentage of the contract value, and a link to the draft."

The Problem

Halfway through the extension, the customer asks for two extra sockets and a different worktop. The site manager nods, the work gets done, and three weeks later the customer is surprised at the invoice. Variations are the single most common cause of bad-feeling-at-the-end on a build, and the cause is almost always the same — they were agreed verbally, not in writing, and no one tracked the running total. By the time we get to the final account we are negotiating from memory and the customer's memory is shorter than ours.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow watching a dedicated variations inbox. An integration step picks up messages with a 'VAR:' subject line. An LLM step reads the body to identify the scope change, the rough materials and labour, and any timeline impact. An integration step pulls the matching job's customer details, contract value, and running variations total from our jobs Google Sheet. Another LLM step generates a proper Variation Order in Google Docs from our standard template — number, description, agreed price, timeline impact, terms, signature box. An integration step files it in the job's Drive folder, appends a row to the job's Variations tab, drafts a customer email asking for sign-off, and posts a Slack message with the running variations total as a percentage of the contract. Glass Box preview shows the document and the email before anything goes out.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): A new email arrives at variations@ourdomain.com with a subject starting 'VAR:'.
  2. Step 1 (llm): Read the body and extract the scope change, materials needed, labour rough estimate, and timeline impact.
  3. Step 2 (integration): Look up the job in the 'Live Jobs' tab of the jobs Google Sheet for customer details, contract value, and existing variations total.
  4. Step 3 (llm): Build a Variation Order document with number, description, agreed price, timeline impact, terms, and signature box, using our standard Google Docs template.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Save the document to the job's folder in Google Drive.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Append a row to the 'Variations' tab with number, date, description, value, and status 'Pending sign-off'.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Draft an email in Gmail to the customer with the variation attached, asking them to reply 'agreed' or sign and return before we proceed.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Post a notification in #jobs on Slack with the job name, the variations total as a percentage of the contract value, and a link to the draft.

Integrations Used

  • Gmail — the variations inbox and the customer-facing draft
  • Google Sheets — the live jobs register and the variations log per job
  • Google Docs — the Variation Order document built from a standard template
  • Google Drive — the job folder where the variation lives
  • Slack — the team notification with the running total

Who This Is For

Builders, fit-out contractors, and refurbishment firms running multi-week jobs where scope creeps in conversation and small variations add up to surprise invoices. Particularly useful where the firm has a project manager who fields the customer's requests on site but does not write up the paperwork until the weekend.

Time & Cost Saved

Writing up a variation properly — pulling the job details, deciding on the price, drafting the email — takes twenty to thirty minutes if it is done at all. On a busy build with five or six variations a month, that is a couple of hours plus the much larger cost of variations that never get written up and end up in a dispute at the final account. This workflow turns each variation into a five-minute review and removes the "I do not remember agreeing to that" conversation at the end of the job.