Go to JBCC’s own free forms page and you can download a payment certificate, a recovery statement, a certificate of practical completion, a certificate of final completion, four kinds of guarantee and the adjudication rules — around thirty documents, at no cost. There is no variation order form among them.
That is not an oversight. Under a JBCC agreement a change to the works is made by a contract instruction issued by the principal agent, and the agreement is written on the assumption that the instruction comes down that way, in writing, before the work happens. The form is missing because in the world the contract describes, the contractor never needs to raise one.
Anyone who has run a site knows what actually happens.
The client walks the slab on a Thursday and says move the scullery door. Your foreman moves it. Nobody writes anything down, because it took an hour and it seemed small. Four months later the principal agent prices the final account against the original drawing and that hour is yours.
What a variation actually is
A variation is any change to the scope, quality, quantity or sequence of the works from what the contract documents describe. The word people reach for is “extra”, which is misleading — an omission is a variation too, and so is being told to do the same work in a different order, or at a different time, or by a different method.
Three things follow from that, and they are the three things contractors most often get wrong:
- A variation can cost you nothing in materials and still be worth money. Being told to leave the roof until the electrical first fix is signed off is a variation. It may add three weeks of preliminaries, and preliminaries are real money.
- It is not a variation because it feels like extra work. If the bill says the excavation is to engineer’s detail and the ground turns out to be harder than you priced, that is your risk, not a variation. Knowing which is which before you claim is what keeps a claim credible.
- A verbal instruction is still an instruction. It is just an instruction you will have to prove. That is the entire problem this form exists to solve.
The five things that have to be on the record
Whatever form you use — this one, your own, the back of a delivery note — a variation record that survives a disputed final account carries five things. Miss any of them and you have a note, not a record.
| What | Why it decides the argument |
|---|---|
| Who instructed it, and when | Names a person and a date. “The client said” is not a person. Four months on, nobody remembers which Thursday. |
| What changed, against what | The instruction only makes sense next to the thing it changed — the drawing number, the revision, the bill item. “Moved the door” is meaningless without “from the position on A-102 Rev C”. |
| Cost, split the way the contract values work | Rates from the bill where the bill has them, quoted where it does not. A single lump sum invites the principal agent to price it himself. |
| Time | Whether it moves practical completion, and by how long. A variation accepted on cost and silent on time is a penalty waiting to be levied. |
| A signature, or the reason there isn’t one | Signed is best. Unsigned and issued the same day, with the site diary entry to match it, is still far better than nothing — see below. |
What to do when nobody will sign
This is the ordinary case on a residential job. There is no principal agent, the client is the client, and asking for a signature every time a tap moves makes you look difficult.
Issue it anyway, and issue it the same day. An emailed variation request sent the afternoon of the instruction, describing what was said and what it will cost, is a contemporaneous record. If it is not disputed within a few days that silence is worth something — not as much as a signature, but a great deal more than a memory.
Same day matters more than the form does. A one-line email sent on the Thursday beats a beautifully completed form filled in from memory in November. Adjudicators and courts weigh contemporaneous records heavily, precisely because they were written before anyone knew what the argument would be.
Where variations go wrong even when they are recorded
The second failure is quieter than the first. The variation is raised, signed, filed — and never reaches the budget. The job carries on being measured against the original contract sum, reads as on-track, and the overrun only appears when the final account is drawn.
Every approved variation should move two numbers on the same day: the revised contract sum, and the budget on the line it affects. If you are tracking a job in a spreadsheet, that is a discipline nobody keeps. It is the single most common reason a job that was “fine” turns out not to have been.
A note on JBCC and this form
The current Principal Building Agreement is Edition 6.2, June 2024. The Minor Works Agreement is Edition 5.2 and the Small and Simple Works Contract is Edition 1, both also June 2024. JBCC’s own guidance puts the PBA on complex projects over nine months or above roughly R5 million, the MWA on simpler work up to about R15 million, and the SSWC on jobs under nine months or up to about R5 million.
The form below is our own document. It is written to sit alongside a JBCC contract and to capture what a JBCC-administered project needs captured, but it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with the Joint Building Contracts Committee, and it does not reproduce any JBCC document. JBCC® is their registered trademark. Where your contract says something different from this page, your contract wins.
And the obvious caveat: this is practical guidance on record-keeping, not legal advice. If a variation is already in dispute, or the money involved is significant, that is a conversation for a construction attorney and not for a form.