Their last minute emergency doesn't need to become yours.

“Can we just add one more thing?”
It sounds small. Until that one thing means another supply run, another hour of work, and rearranging a day that was already full.
You want to help your customers. You also need the business to pay for the help you provide.

Decide your rules before someone needs an exception
Choose a realistic booking lead time, a final deadline for changes, and a clear process for requesting additional work. Explain when payment reserves the booking and when the remaining balance is due.
Make those details visible before the customer commits. Then repeat the important dates in their confirmation.
Customers can’t follow boundaries they haven’t been told about.

Price the actual extra work
A rush request might create expedited shipping, overtime, extra travel, or scheduling disruption. Identify those costs before naming a fee.
Use your job costing numbers to evaluate the whole request. A fee that sounds impressive may still leave you paying for the privilege of squeezing it in.
You can also decline. A rush fee doesn’t create more hours or make an impossible deadline possible.

Give a clear choice
Try: “Yes, if we confirm the change by noon today. The additional work is $125, bringing your total to $___ . If you’d rather keep the original plan, we can absolutely do that.”

Or: “We’ve passed the ordering deadline for that color. I can offer these two available options, or we can keep your original design.”
The customer can decide with the information in front of them. You don’t need a long explanation about how exhausted you are.

1. Confirm the revised scope, price, deadline, and customer approval before doing the additional work. Send an updated invoice or order summary so both of you are working from the same information.
2. Keep a simple change log. After a few jobs, review the requests that keep repeating. If every customer asks the same question, your original description may need more detail.
3. Start with the boundary that would save you the most time this week. It might be your order cutoff, your delivery area, or what counts as an additional charge.

You can care about the celebration and still protect the business making it happen.

Know what the extra work costs: Use my free job pricing calculator to account for materials, labor, and overhead before you agree to the next “little” addition. Button: Get the Free Pricing Calculator.