A change request form template, filled in as a sample.

A change request form template for client work needs eleven fields and no more than that: the project, a request number, the date, who asked, what they asked for, the reason they gave, the cost, the effect on the delivery date, what happens if you skip it, who approved it, and when. The whole form is written out below, with the arithmetic that fills the cost line and the rule that decides whose yes counts.

The popular free templates come from project management platforms serving corporate IT departments, so they carry fields for risk classification, emergency change categories and the comments of a change advisory board. An agency of five people has none of those things. What it has is a client who asked for something on a call, a fixed price that no longer covers the work, and about ten minutes to turn that into a decision somebody can approve by email.

What belongs on a change request form for client work?

Four lines make one work at all: what was asked for, what it costs, what it does to the delivery date, and the name of the person who said yes. Type those into an email and you have settled most of the arguments this document exists to settle, which is worth knowing on the afternoon you need something sent in ten minutes. The eleven fields below are those four plus seven that save you reconstructing anything later, and a request without a number and a date is impossible to reconcile against an invoice two months on.

The field most agencies leave off does the most work in a difficult conversation, and it's the line describing what happens if the change doesn't go ahead. Writing "the homepage ships with the three sections agreed in March" underneath a $2,800 price gives the client a real choice between two defined outcomes rather than a bill to accept or argue with. Clients who feel they're choosing behave completely differently from clients who feel they're being charged.

Two fields on the enterprise templates are worth deleting on purpose. Priority ratings of high, medium and low mean nothing on a project with one client and one delivery date, since every request is urgent to the person making it. Risk classification exists so a review board can decide what needs extra scrutiny, and you are the review board.

One field is worth adding that the standard templates never include, naming what the change replaces or adds to in the original agreement. Pointing at the specific line in the signed scope ends the argument about whether the work was always included, and it's the difference between a form that documents a change and one that settles a dispute about it.

What does a filled-in change request form sample look like?

Here's the complete form, ready to copy into a document or the body of an email. Everything in square brackets gets replaced and nothing else changes from one project to the next.

Notice how short the descriptive fields are. A change request that runs to a page invites the client to read it as a negotiating document and respond clause by clause, when the whole thing should take them ninety seconds to decide. Two sentences, one number, one date and a name is the entire useful content.

Write the description in your own words rather than pasting what the client wrote. Client requests arrive as "can we also do something with the case studies", and your job is to turn that into "add a case study template with a filterable index page, using the existing blog styles". If they correct your version, you found the misunderstanding before it cost you three days.

If they approve your description, you've agreed on what gets built. If they correct it, you found the misunderstanding for free.

How do you work out the cost and the timeline lines?

Estimate the hours honestly, multiply by the blended rate you used to price the original project, then add somewhere between twenty and thirty percent for the disruption of dropping new work into a project already in flight. That uplift isn't padding, since it covers the re-planning, the context switching, and the work that has to be revisited because it was built against an assumption the change has now broken.

Take an example most agencies will recognize. A client on a $20,000 website build asks in week three for a case study template and a newsletter integration, which sketches out honestly as a day of design, a day and a half of build and half a day of revisions. At a blended rate of $150 an hour across a seven hour day, three days of work is $3,150, and a twenty-five percent uplift for the mid-project disruption takes it to just under $4,000. The arithmetic takes about four minutes.

Check it from the other direction before you send it. Absorbing that request means delivering $3,150 of work free on a project whose entire profit margin was probably smaller than that, so the change wouldn't reduce your profit on the job, it would erase it, which is what a year of absorbed changes does to an agency's numbers.

Set a minimum change fee and put it in the proposal you send before the statement of work , somewhere between one and two hours of your blended rate, so roughly $150 to $300 at typical rates. Scoping and re-planning a tiny change costs nearly what a large one costs, and clients stop sending three small requests a week once each one carries a visible number.

Quote the delivery impact in the same breath as the money, in working days rather than as a vague delay. A client who waves through $4,000 without blinking will often reconsider once they see the launch move by five days, and that is a perfectly good outcome too, because both numbers describe the same decision.

Who has to approve the change request?

One named person, agreed at kickoff, whose email address you write down before the project starts. It's the single most useful sentence in the whole process and it's missing from the free templates, because enterprise projects solve the same problem with an approval board. An agency can't convene a board, so it names a human being.

The problem the named approver solves is authority rather than paperwork. A marketing coordinator can enthusiastically approve $6,000 of extra work with no ability whatsoever to authorize $6,000 of spending, and you find this out when the invoice reaches their director. Clients rarely object to naming someone, because the arrangement protects their budget as much as it protects your margin.

A written yes from that person is enough. There's no need for a signature or a countersigned PDF, and asking for one usually slows the reply down by a week. An email saying "approved, go ahead" from the named address, with the form quoted underneath, carries the description, the price, the date and the approver's identity in one artifact. We've written separately about the layers that make an approval hold up when somebody later disputes it, and the short version is that the value of that email lies entirely in still being findable and dated six months after everyone has forgotten the conversation.

Record the refusals on the same form as carefully as the approvals. A change marked declined with a date is a decision you can point at when the same request resurfaces in week nine as something you'd supposedly always agreed to. Agencies that file only the approved ones lose half the value of keeping records.

What do you send with the form?

Three or four sentences of plain email, with the form underneath. The covering note does something the form can't, which is make the exchange feel like ordinary project administration rather than an escalation, and its tone decides how the client reads everything below it.

That message confirms the request came from a real conversation, gives both numbers together, makes it explicit that no work has started, and offers a route out if the answer is no. The last one matters more than people expect, because a client whose only options are yes and no will sometimes pick no out of discomfort with the price.

Send it within a day of the request landing, which is where nearly all the relationship risk in this subject sits. The same price reads as attentive service in the same week and as a surprise charge six weeks later on an invoice line. Our fuller walkthrough of handling scope creep covers the reply you send before the form is even written.

Is a change request the same thing as a change order?

A change request is the ask and a change order is the priced answer, though in agency work the same document usually does both jobs, and plenty of clients will call the same thing a request for change. The distinction comes from construction and large engineering projects, where a request goes to an estimating team who produce the order as a separate document, sometimes weeks later. Nobody in a six-person agency has an estimating team.

So your form should carry the price rather than promise one. Sending a client a description with no number invites a "sounds good" that commits nothing, and you'll be back at the same conversation once you've done the estimate anyway. One document, one round trip, one decision is what works when the person pricing the change is also designing it.

The vocabulary still matters in the contract, because a scope of work that says changes are handled through written change orders sets the expectation that extra work gets paid for. Say it at kickoff too, while there's nothing at stake, using the two-minute script for raising change orders early.

Why the spreadsheet version of this never gets approved

Plenty of agencies keep their changes in a spreadsheet, one request per row, and it is a good way to see what a project absorbed over six months and a poor way to get a yes. Three of the eleven fields are sentences rather than values, and the one doing the most work in a difficult conversation, the line saying what happens if the change doesn't go ahead, is a paragraph no column width survives. Nobody has ever replied "approved" to a row.

So keep both, and be clear about which is which. The document leaves your building, one per change, carrying the description, the price, the date impact and the name. The spreadsheet is the log you keep afterward, five columns you can lift straight off the forms you already sent. Building the log first and hoping to approve out of it is the order that fails.

The habit is what carries the value either way. An agency that fills in eleven fields consistently for six months is in far better shape than one that buys software and keeps approving things verbally, and Docket exists to make writing it down the cheapest available action rather than to replace the habit.

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