A Change Order (CO) tracks changes required to the items in a project's Bill of Materials (BoM). Changes may arise from the need to upsize or downsize the project, or to swap products due to unsuitability or unavailability.

A CO can include additions, omissions, and substitutions to items currently in the project BoM.

You can create COs within a project from the "Details > Change Orders" tab in the Project Details view or from “Project > Change Orders” in the left navigation menu.

When making changes to items to create the CO, the CO creation experience is similar to the quote creation experience.

Check out this article for more details about creating a CO.

You can create two types of COs on Cloud: External CO and Internal CO. When creating a CO, you can choose the CO type.

An "External CO" is a CO shared with the customer for review and acceptance as a CO proposal. The customer can accept the CO proposal via the CO Proposal Acceptance workflow.

After the customer accepts the CO proposal:

Learn more about External CO

An "Internal CO" is a CO created with customer approval and an agreement that the customer does not have to review and accept the CO proposal via the CO Proposal Acceptance workflow.

After an internal CO is approved, the item and price changes in the CO are factored into the BoM, with the relevant CO numbers next to the items.

Learn more about Internal CO

You can filter the COs created for all projects by external or internal on the “Project > Change Orders” page.

You can filter the COs created for a project by external or internal COs on the "Details > Change Orders" tab in the Project Details view.

You need to create a proposal for an external CO and share it with the customer for acceptance. The proposal creation and sharing experience is similar to the project proposal creation and sharing experience.

Check out this article for more details.

Cloud has a “Project Manager Approval” functionality that acts as an intermediate internal approval to finalize COs. By design, this functionality cannot be disabled, and the internal approver is always the Project Manager assigned to the project.

For project managers to approve COs, they need to be part of a user group with the "Approve or reject change orders” permission.

The Project Manager can approve or reject the CO and cite an appropriate reason. After rejecting the CO, the CO creator can update it and request approval again.

Check out this article for more details about Project Manager Approval for COs.

COs can be assigned a number within a project to identify them easily; for example, CO-25.

You can also enable a setting under "Settings > Project > Change Order Number Option" and define a number format to assign COs numbers within a project. You can configure the setting so external and internal COs use different number formats with different prefixes. For example, ECO-

Check out this article for more details.

On cloud, COs are tracked from creation until customers accept or decline them. You can see a complete set of states under “Settings > Project > Change Order States.”