In construction, project teams live and die by the accuracy of their forecasts. The problem? Forecasts are only as good as the data they’re built on, and when it comes to Change Orders, much of the real risk hides beneath the surface.
That’s why most project teams resort to chasing COR Logs from their Subcontractors once or twice a month, and sometimes even more often. It’s the only way to check that the costs captured in the back-end financial system match what’s really happening on the job.
But this stopgap is far from perfect: it requires every stakeholder to pause their work, compile a log, send it back over, and then forces the GC team to reconcile it line by line against their own records. The process eats up valuable hours, delays visibility into emerging risk, and almost guarantees that something will slip through the cracks.
That’s the Change Order Iceberg: the clarity of what your financial system shows you up top and the unseen costs piling up in inboxes, on jobsite paperwork, and in half-finished pricing exercises underneath. Above the waterline, your system of record reflects the numbers you know. Below the waterline lies the risk exposure that blindsides projects and leads to surprise costs at closeout.
Clearstory was built to surface those hidden costs faster.
Every GC relies on their ERP or project financial software as the backbone of the forecasting process. It is essential for tracking costs and projecting outcomes, but by design these systems are private and closed. They only show what has been captured, coded, and formally entered.
What they cannot show are the design changes still being priced, the Change Order requests sitting in a project engineer’s inbox, or the T&M Tags signed on the jobsite but not yet priced into a COR by the Subcontractor. They also cannot account for scope gaps that have not yet triggered a formal COR, work that is ongoing but undocumented, or disputes still being sorted out between field and office teams.
Those blind spots are what drag projects into the red at the end of the job. Clearstory acts as a real-time, supercharged communication layer between stakeholders, closing the gap between what is visible in the financial system and what is actually outstanding between all the Subcontractors and the Client. It delivers real-time visibility into pricing exercises, T&M Tags, and all CORs as they happen so risk exposure is surfaced before it can derail closeouts and erode fees and margin.
Underneath the Change Order Iceberg are three categories of risk. Clearstory’s recent industry survey of more than 300 construction professionals found that 86% of teams are facing more Change Orders today than five years ago. But while volume is up across the board, risk isn’t distributed evenly.
These are the changes most GCs can see. They make up the majority of Change Order volume, around 63% on an average project. But because they’re formalized and typically processed through established (if inefficient) workflows, they represent just 10% of fee erosion disputes.
Still, they create drag. Emails scatter pricing exercises across dozens of trades, leaving project teams chasing responses, updating side spreadsheets, and struggling to package data for owners.
Clearstory streamlines this chaos with Change Notifications: every bulletin, addendum, or revision is distributed through a live, transparent log that tracks who has received it, who has responded, and what the projected cost impact will be. Instead of chasing emails and side spreadsheets for weeks, project teams gain real-time visibility into the entire pricing exercise from start to finish.
Here’s where the real danger lurks. 55% of General Contractor fee erosion driven by Change Order risk comes from T&M work, yet the average time it takes Subcontractors to price a T&M Tag into a Change Order Request is nearly 30 days. That means exposure isn’t visible until it’s too late to forecast accurately.
From carbon copy paper tickets in the field to scanned Tags across multiple emails, it's no wonder why pricing in the office faces numerous delays. Clearstory digitizes the process end-to-end: Subcontractor superintendents and foremen log work in a mobile app, attach photos, grab GC Superintendent electronic signatures, and everything syncs instantly to a live log the project management team can see. Specialty Contractors upload their labor, material, and equipment rates so pricing can happen automatically. What once took a month now happens in seconds, giving GCs visibility into today’s risk, not last month’s.
The final category of hidden risk is unsolicited CORs, initiated by Subcontractors in response to unforeseen conditions, design clashes, scope gaps, and trade damage, just to name a few. They represent just 7% of total COR volume, but a staggering 35% of disputes and fee erosion related to Change Order risk
The reason? These CORs are often delayed, get lost in email, are tracked in siloed spreadsheets, and fail to align with the GC’s PCO budget. Clearstory fixes this by making every COR request valid only when uploaded to the live, cloud-based Change Order Log. From there, version history, markups, and a digital paper trail bring transparency and accountability to a process that’s otherwise messy and prone to conflict.
Taken together, these three categories explain the heart of the iceberg problem. While your system of record may do an OK job reflecting changes after they are entered (the visible 10% of risk), the financial risk lives in workflows that ERPs and project accounting tools can’t touch.
That’s the hammer blow: if you’re forecasting only from your financial system, the risk exposure is always delayed.
Clearstory doesn’t replace your system of record. It complements it by capturing the workflow that is invisible to the financial system at the point of origin. Clearstory turns the “unknown” into shared, real-time visibility.
The Change Order Iceberg is more than just a metaphor. It’s the reality of why projects blow their fee projections and struggle at closeout. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
With Clearstory, GCs never need to ask for a Subcontractor’s COR log again. Instead, every pricing request, every T&M tag, every unsolicited COR flows into a live, collaborative log. Owners gain faster visibility, Subcontractors get paid sooner, and GCs forecast with confidence.
Because you can’t forecast what you can’t see. And Clearstory makes the unseen visible.
Ready to surface your hidden costs? Book a free demo today and see how Clearstory turns the iceberg into smooth sailing for projects of any size.