What happens to unpriced variations at month end?

The instinct to leave a variation off the application until it is fully priced feels tidy and is quietly expensive. A change instructed and started is work the job owes you for, and its final price still moving does not mean its value this month is zero. The right move at month end is to carry every live variation into the application at your honest current assessment, clearly marked as an assessment rather than an agreed figure, and to refine it in later cycles as the measure and the rates settle. That protects two things. It protects cashflow, because you are paid something for the work as it proceeds rather than financing all of it yourself until the price is nailed down. And it protects the record, because a variation that appears on every application from the month it happened is far harder to dispute than one that materialises, fully formed and unheralded, at the final account, where its sudden appearance invites the question of why it was never claimed before. The discipline: mark assessments honestly, do not inflate them to bank a high opening position, and reconcile them against the register each month so the two tell one story. But the cardinal rule is that silence concedes. An unpriced variation that is never claimed is not kept in reserve, it is forgotten, usually by the party holding the money.

Consider a fit-out subcontractor with four variations instructed in a single busy month, none of them fully measured by the application date. Rather than leave all four off and price them properly next time, they go in at an honest assessment, flagged as provisional, with a one-line basis for each. Three settle close to the assessed figure over the next two cycles; the fourth turns out larger once the concealed work is opened up, and the assessment is revised upward with the evidence to support it. On a parallel job the same subcontractor leaves an equivalent set off the applications entirely, meaning to tidy them at the final account. When it comes the contractor's surveyor treats the late-appearing changes with deep suspicion, and two are whittled down simply because there is no history of them ever having been claimed. Same work, same values; the difference was whether the changes had been on the account all along.