How to Tell a Client Something Is Out of Scope: Two Sentences, a Price, and a Name on It

The two-sentence reply, and five ways to say it

The reply has three parts and no more: name the scope, name the price or the date a price will arrive, and name the yes. No apology, no “unfortunately”, no paragraph about the contract. The SOW comes out only if the client disputes what it says. The prices below are illustrative; the firm’s own rate card supplies the real ones.

• Price known: “That’s outside the current scope. It’s $1,800 and about a week of work; reply yes and we’ll schedule it.”
• Price not known yet: “That’s outside the current scope. We’ll send a price and timing by Thursday; nothing starts until you reply yes.”
• A swap: “That’s outside this month’s scope. We can do it in place of the second article, or add it for $900. Which would you prefer?”
• Included on purpose: “That’s outside the current scope, and we’re glad to include it this time at no charge. We’ll note it so the next request like it comes with a price.”
• Later: “That’s not in this year’s scope. Let’s put it in the plan for the renewal.” One media agency attendee at the same town hall described a version of this move — making it “very clear to them we’re not scoped for that work” before the client could assume it was coming.

Each version ends with something the client can answer. That is the point: the request stops being an assumption on the agency’s side and becomes a decision on the client’s side, with a price attached. Some requests can disappear at that moment, and that is information too: they were made because asking cost nothing.

Who on the account sends it, and when

The account lead sends it, in writing, the same business day — even when the answer was already given out loud on a call. The account lead holds the relationship, so the price should come from the person the client already trusts, not from an invoice six weeks later or a finance email the client has never seen before.

The account lead should not have to invent the price in the moment, and should not have to negotiate it. Two things make that possible. A project manager or team lead supplies the hours estimate within a day. And the owner sets the price rules once: an hourly rate for out-of-scope work, a short price list for the requests that recur — an extra landing page, a new press-list build, another round of revisions — and a threshold above which a partner signs off. With those in place the account lead is passing on a price, not haggling over one.

What the owner should not be is the only person allowed to say it. If every “that’s extra” has to wait for the founder, the founder becomes the bottleneck, and the team learns that saying yes is faster than asking.

On a live call, the move is a third answer that is neither yes nor no: “Good idea. Let me check what it takes and come back to you today.” Then the recap email carries the two sentences. Saying yes on the call commits hours nobody has estimated; saying no on the call can sound like a refusal of something the client may well be willing to pay for.

How to handle out-of-scope requests on paper: a change log and a scope change request

The route needs two pieces of paper, both short. The first is a change log, one line per request, pinned in the project channel or kept as a tab in the project tool where the whole account team can see it:

• Date, and who asked.
• What was asked, in the client’s own words.
• In scope or out, and who decided.
• Price and timing sent, and the date.
• The client’s answer: yes, no, later, or included on purpose.
• The time code the hours go to.

The second is the scope change request, or change order, for anything the client says yes to: a description of the added work, the reason, the hours and price, what it does to the timeline and to other items in the SOW, and the name of the client approver. Whether it needs a signature or an email reply is a question for the firm’s attorney and its master agreement. The operational rule is simpler: a separate time code opens only when the yes arrives, so hours spent before it show up as exactly that.

Count last quarter’s out-of-scope work from the firm’s own records

Before changing anything, find out how big the gap is. The count takes an afternoon from records the firm already keeps, and it reports by client and by role, never by named person:

• Requests: from the project channels and client email, list last quarter’s asks that were not in the SOW. Where searching is impractical, ask each account lead to list them from memory and mark it as a lower bound.
• Change orders: from billing or the project tool, every change order issued in the same quarter, with its amount.
• Hours past budget: from the time tracker, hours logged under each original project or retainer code past the hours its fee assumed.
• The match: for each request, was it priced, declined, deferred, included on purpose — or just done?

Illustrative example: a 20-person agency lists 14 out-of-scope requests last quarter across six clients. Three became change orders. Two were declined or deferred. Nine were done, and the time tracker shows about 70 hours past budget on the codes they landed under. At a blended $150 an hour, that is about $10,500 of work delivered in a quarter that nobody decided to give away. The numbers are round and hypothetical; the firm’s own records give the real ones, and the useful part is the split between “priced”, “given on purpose” and “just done”.

Some yeses are worth giving — give them knowingly

Not every out-of-scope request should be billed. At the same Digiday town hall, another attendee argued there is no such thing as scope creep, only opportunity, provided the cost conversation is transparent. A small favor for a client in a pitch for more work, a fix for something the agency got wrong, a gesture in a hard month for a long-standing client: each can be the right call.

The difference between a gift and a leak is whether someone chose it. A yes given on purpose has a reason code in the change log — relationship, new-business, agency error, courtesy — and the client hears that it was included, so the next one is not assumed. A quarterly cap per client keeps courtesy from becoming the scope. And before every renewal, the log becomes the agenda: what the SOW priced, what the client asked for, what the team delivered. One town-hall attendee described running that look-back before scope negotiations, so that when increased scope came up, the client remembered the work behind it.

When not to hire anyone, and where the Review fits

If last quarter’s count shows a handful of requests and nearly all of them priced, nothing needs fixing beyond keeping the log. If it shows a long list of “just done”, the fix is still mostly free: price rules from the owner, the two sentences from the account lead, a change log, and a separate time code that opens on yes. Contract wording — what the master agreement says about changes, approvals and rates — belongs with the firm’s attorney.

Out-of-scope work sits at one of the six hand-offs between a first inquiry and collected cash — contract to delivery — and the same records can show leaks at the others: retainers that run past their hours, revision rounds past the SOW, proposals parked at “Sent”, invoices past terms. If the pattern looks wider than one log can fix, the Revenue Review takes two weeks. It reads time entries, project budgets, change orders and invoice dates on read-only access under an NDA, opens no client work, and ends in a written report with a monthly dollar figure wherever the records support one and a 90-day plan; any implementation is scoped and priced separately.

It is not worth buying when the count is small or the fix is already obvious. A free 20-minute call is enough to tell which case applies, and a firm too small for the arithmetic is told so.