Why Does the Extra-Work Approval Get Lost Between Site and Office?
The approval gets lost because it travels from site to office as sound, not text, so its survival depends on the memory of someone already juggling ten other things.
Picture a site engineer calling the project manager because the required concrete thickness needs adjusting, or because a specified finishing material is unavailable and needs substituting. The project manager, mid-call or mid-meeting, approves verbally with a quick "go ahead." The worker proceeds on an approval that was never written anywhere, not in an email, not in minutes, not in a log. This pattern is common enough that over 70% of construction projects in Saudi Arabia experience delays, many escalating into disputes when the change decision lacks clear documentation.4
The problem rarely surfaces right away. It surfaces weeks later, when the invoice arrives and the consultant objects to an item outside the original scope, or when payment stalls because the owner wants proof of who approved the change and when. That is when the site engineer discovers that the approval the entire work was built on was a word in a phone call, not a line in a log. Late site access and delayed approvals are both common on Saudi projects and affect a notable share of them,1 and they remain a frequent trigger for payment disputes between developers, contractors and subcontractors.5
What Is the Difference Between a Documented Decision and a Verbal One?
The difference is not in the quality of the decision itself, but in whether it can later be proven to a consultant, an owner, or in a claim.
The practical rule is simple: any decision that changes quantity, material, price or schedule gets written in one fixed-format line before execution, not a week later when the invoice needs justifying. That line needs only four elements: exactly what changed, who approved it by name, when approval was given (date and time), and the expected impact on cost and schedule. When a variation order genuinely is issued verbally, as often happens on site, the contractor is expected to document it in writing as soon as possible, through meeting minutes or a confirming message, so entitlement can later be proven if needed.6
Variation orders issued orally or poorly documented are a recurring cause of escalating disputes across the region's projects, in Saudi Arabia and in similar Gulf markets such as the UAE and Bahrain4. The practical gap shows up precisely at dispute time: when a firm has to retrospectively rely on correspondence and meeting minutes to prove what happened, it means no regularly updated progress record existed in the first place, which is exactly what a unified log is meant to prevent.6
How Do You Build a Unified Approval Log With Your Current Team?
You build it with a simple shared table you start using this week, not with a new product that needs training and months of setup.
The fixed columns the log needs are: decision number, one-sentence description of the change, requester's name, approver's name, request date, response deadline, and status (pending, approved, rejected). A mid-sized contracting firm running a residential project in Jeddah, for example, starts with one shared sheet accessible to its three site engineers and the project manager. The decisive rule here: no verbal instruction gets executed before it is logged within the same working hours, even if approval was already given over a call. This turns the call into a trigger, not a final decision; the log is what makes the decision official.
This step matters because scope changes and delayed approvals are among the most common triggers of payment disputes in the Saudi contracting sector,5 and delayed site access alone disrupts a higher share of projects in Saudi Arabia than elsewhere in the Middle East.1 The smaller the gap between a decision being made and it being logged, the lower the chance it later becomes a point of dispute. Firms juggling multiple projects that also need visible progress updates for stakeholders may find a related pattern in fixing the content approval bottleneck, where delays stem from the same root cause: missing documentation, or review how live handover logs replace verbal notes across multi-shift teams.
Which Part of the Follow-Up Suits an AI Agent, and Which Stays With the Engineer?
The automated part is reminding and escalating as deadlines approach or pass. Judging the decision itself remains a purely engineering and contractual call.
Once the unified log exists, business automation can monitor it and send an automatic reminder for any pending decision nearing its deadline, then escalate to a higher level if the deadline passes without a response. This removes dependence on one person's memory to track dozens of open decisions across multiple sites at once. But when the alert fires, evaluating cost and schedule impact, and formally approving a material substitution or quantity change, remains a decision for the project engineer and the approving manager, because it needs technical and contractual judgment no automation can replace.
This split protects the firm from two opposite mistakes: leaving follow-up to individual memory, where decisions get lost as they do today, and handing the decision itself to an automated tool that cannot grasp contract context or a consultant's sensitivities. Contract interpretation and contract administration disputes have historically run higher in the Middle East than the rest of the world, though that gap has been narrowing,2 and this is exactly the kind of decision that needs an engineer who understands the full contractual picture, not just an automated nudge.
How Do You Measure the Impact of a Unified Approval Log?
You measure it with two specific numbers before and after, not with a general feeling that the team has gotten faster.
Before starting, track for two weeks the number of decisions executed on verbal approval alone with no documentation, and the average number of days between a decision being requested and formally approved in writing. A contracting firm running two sites in Dammam, for example, might find that half its material-change decisions over two weeks left no written trace at all, and that the real average wait exceeds what the team assumed. After a full month of using the unified log and activating automatic reminders, the same two numbers get measured again, the same way.
The real metric is the drop in undocumented decisions and in average waiting days, not the team's impression that things feel easier. This matters especially because Middle East contractors claim extensions of time at a share of planned schedules notably above the global average,1 making every extra day of waiting between a decision request and its approval a cumulative burden on the overall project timeline, not just a minor administrative delay.
When Does a Unified Approval Log Not Fit, and When Do You Need More?
It does not fit if your team is small enough to communicate directly every day, and it fits you more the moment you run multiple sites or face recurring invoice disputes.
If your firm manages one small project with a team of three people sitting on the same site and talking directly each day, a simple manually updated spreadsheet may be entirely enough, with no added automation. But if you run several concurrent sites in different cities, or repeatedly face disputes with the consultant or owner over invoices due to missing documentation, the simple log becomes a starting point, not the end state. Saudi Arabia accounts for roughly 39% of the total MENA construction project pipeline by value,3 a scale that means many firms already manage more than one site at once, and the volume of decisions moving between site and office grows fast.
At that point, the next step is an internal platform that brings approvals and tasks into one place genuinely tied to your team's workflow, not a generic off-the-shelf solution forced onto how you actually work, and this may also call for a lightweight internal app for site engineers that does not depend on office connectivity. The Saudi Centre for Commercial Arbitration has already seen a notable rise in construction disputes, prompting reform efforts to support faster procedures,3 a sign that the cost of missing documentation is no longer a minor detail. If your firm has reached this stage, it is worth a direct conversation with the ASLS team to build something sized to your actual project volume.
Sources
- 1Key lessons for contractors in the Kingdom: Managing risks and claims in Saudi Arabia · HKA (2024)
- 2The Middle East perspective: Findings from the CRUX Eighth Annual Report – From Insight to Foresight · HKA (2025)
- 3Construction Disputes in Saudi Arabia: Litigation Guide · HKA (2026)
- 4Framework for leveraging BIM to mitigate disputes in construction projects in Saudi Arabia · Frontiers in Built Environment (2025)
- 5Payment Delays Impacting Contractors on Saudi Giga Projects · DisputeIQ (2025-02)
- 6Documents and other types of evidence in construction disputes · Global Arbitration Review (2025-08)
