Every Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. the GC runs a coordination meeting. Your foreman is in it for two hours, off the tools, sorting out whose conduit crosses whose duct in the second-floor east wing.
That is real labor. But electrical contractor jobsite coordination meeting hours billing is where most T&M tickets fall apart, because the invoice says "Foreman — 2.0 hrs" and nothing else. The PM reviewing it sees supervision time and asks why he is paying your man to sit in his own meeting.
He is not disputing the hours. He cannot reconstruct them. That is a different problem with a different fix.
The fix is not a better argument after the invoice goes out. It is one line of writing on the day it happened. Everything below is the full method — the contract check, the line-item wording, the arithmetic, and the paperwork.
Are Jobsite Coordination Meeting Hours Billable?
On a time-and-material job, coordination meeting hours are billable direct labor when the meeting is jobsite-specific work the contract does not already fold into overhead — and your contract, not custom, decides which it is.
There are only three answers, and yours is written down somewhere already.
| How the time is treated | What the contract says | What you do with the hours |
|---|
Go read your own contract before the next meeting. Search the executed agreement for four words: supervision, burdened, non-productive, and meetings.
Ten minutes of reading tells you which of the three rows above you are in, before the hours are already on a ticket. One more rule holds in all three cases: if the GC directed the attendance, say so in writing on the day.
What a Coordination Meeting Line Item Has to Say
A meeting line item survives review when it names five things: the date, who attended and their classification, which meeting it was, in and out times, and one sentence on what was decided or directed.
That is the whole standard. Miss the last one and the line reads as attendance. Include it and the line reads as work product.
| Element | Weak | Defensible |
|---|
| Date | Week of 9/8 | Tue 9/9/2026 |
| Who | Field labor | Foreman (journeyman foreman), 1 attendee |
| Which meeting | Meeting | Weekly GC coordination meeting, trailer, GC-directed attendance |
| Duration | 2.0 hrs | 7:02a–9:04a (2.03 hrs) |
| What came of it | — | Resolved conduit routing conflict with mechanical, 2nd-floor east wing; feeder rerouted above ceiling grid per RFI 114; GC directed hold on circuits 12–18 until duct hangers set |
The last cell is the one that ends the dispute. A PM can check it against his own meeting minutes in thirty seconds, and once he can, he stops looking for padding.
The Same Two Hours, Written Two Ways
Here is the identical charge on the identical job. One gets queried. One gets paid.
The version that gets queried9/09 Foreman 2.0 hrs @ $96.00 $192.00
9/09 Foreman — 7:02a–9:04a (2.03 hrs) @ $96.00 $194.88
Weekly GC coordination meeting (GC-directed).
Resolved 2nd-floor east wing conduit vs. mechanical
duct conflict; feeder rerouted above ceiling grid per
RFI 114. GC directed hold on circuits 12-18 pending
duct hangers. Attendees: GC supt., mech. foreman, our foreman.
Same hours. Same rate. The second one costs one sentence typed on Tuesday and takes the argument off the table in October.
Notice what the second version does not do: it does not plead and it does not justify. It reports. Reporting is more persuasive than arguing, because the reader reaches the conclusion himself.
Labeled Example Arithmetic: What the Meetings Add Up To
Run this with your own numbers. Every input is visible so you can swap it.
| Input (example only) | Value |
|---|
| Coordination / OAC meetings per week | 2 |
| Average length, including the walk after | 1.75 hrs |
| Attendees from your company | 1 foreman |
| Foreman bill rate | $96.00/hr |
| Weeks on the job | 26 |
2 meetings × 1.75 hrs × 1 attendee = 3.5 hrs/week.
3.5 hrs × $96.00 = $336.00/week. $336.00 × 26 weeks = $8,736.00 of coordination labor on one job, in the example above.
That figure is not money anybody owes you. It is the size of the line item that either arrives explained or arrives contested.
If your contract absorbs the time in OH&P, the same arithmetic tells you what to carry in the next bid instead. To price what the argument itself costs in review time and discounted hours, the invoice dispute calculator runs that math with your inputs visible.
Getting the Foreman to Write the Sentence
This is the real obstacle, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's time. Nobody who has spent two hours in a trailer argument wants to open a form afterward.
So make the ask small and make it immediate. Two rules.
One sentence, not a report. Ask for what was decided or directed, in his own words. "Duct conflict east wing, we reroute above grid, GC says hold 12-18" is a complete, usable note.Clean it up in the office if you must — do not send it back to the field for polish.
Before he leaves the trailer, not at the end of the week. A Friday recap produces "meetings" and nothing else, because by Friday the detail is genuinely gone.Two habits that hold up in the field:
- The five-line card. Print the meeting fields on a half-sheet and keep a stack in the gang box. Date, meeting, in/out, attendees, what was directed. He fills it standing up and hands it in with the daily.
- The voice memo. Thirty seconds recorded walking back to the panel, transcribed in the office. Easier than typing on a cold morning with gloves on.
Keeping Meeting Hours Separate Without Cost Codes
You do not need a cost-code system to split meeting hours out. You need a consistent first word in the note.
Start every coordination entry with the same tag — COORD: works — and keep it identical on every ticket. Any spreadsheet filter, text search, or sort on the description column then pulls the whole category in one pass.
COORD: weekly GC coordination mtg 7:02a-9:04a — conduit vs. mech,
2nd flr east wing, reroute above grid per RFI 114
That one convention gives you three things a code system would: a billable-versus-absorbed split at invoice time, a real number for the next bid, and an answer when the owner asks how much coordination the project consumed.
Pick the tag once, write it on the card, and never let two spellings exist.
Put Meeting Direction in Writing the Same Day
The most expensive thing said in a coordination meeting is a scope change nobody wrote down. "Go ahead and pick up the receptacles in 214 while you're up there" is a change to the work, delivered verbally, remembered by one person.
Send a same-day confirmation email. Short, factual, no invoice attached:
Confirming direction given in this morning's coordination meeting (9/9): we are to reroute the east wing feeder above the ceiling grid per RFI 114, and hold circuits 12–18 until mechanical sets duct hangers. Added scope in 214 (six receptacles) will be priced as a change order; we have not started it. Please advise if this does not match your understanding.
A confirmation nobody objects to becomes the record. If it does turn into a change order, the T&M Billing Backup Kit has the work-authorization form, the change-order log, and the daily field report already laid out — free, no signup, print and use.
How the Hours Get From the Ticket to the Invoice
The path is short, and it is the same on paper or on a phone: a note written in the field, carried verbatim into the billing backup, attached to the invoice.
| Step | What happens | Where it usually breaks |
|---|
| 1. Field | Foreman writes the meeting note before leaving the site | Skipped — the single most common failure |
| 2. Office | Hours entered with the note kept word-for-word | Note gets summarized down to "meeting" during entry |
| 3. Backup | Line item built: date, who, what was done, hours, bill rate, amount | Backup lists hours with no descriptions |
| 4. Invoice | Backup goes out attached, not on request | Sent only after the customer questions the charge |
Step 2 is where most of the value is destroyed. Somebody retypes a good field note into a bad one because the entry box is short. Keep the foreman's sentence intact even if it is ugly.
A spreadsheet and a printed packet do all four steps. FieldTimesheet is one way to shorten the middle two — the worker's clock-out note lands on the printable customer billing packet without retyping, and finished entries push to QuickBooks Online as time activities when an admin clicks sync, though that push carries date, worker, hours and the note only, so the customer, service item and billable flag are still set in QuickBooks by hand.
The paper route works fine. The point is the note surviving intact, not the software. To see what the finished attachment looks like before building your own, read the annotated sample billing packet.
The Monday Routine That Prevents the October Argument
Five minutes, once a week, in this order.
- Pull the week's coordination entries by their
COORD:tag. - Check each one has a decision sentence. A note with only a duration gets a phone call to the foreman today, while he still remembers.
- Confirm the billable-or-absorbed call against the contract language you looked up. Same call every week, no re-litigating.
- Match directed scope to open change orders. Anything directed in a meeting and not yet on a change order gets one started.
- Attach the backup before the invoice goes out — not after the customer asks for it.
For the wider documentation standard these entries sit inside, see T&M billing best practices, or start from a printed sheet with the free timesheet templates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I bill for the GC's own coordination meeting?Under a straight T&M labor clause with no supervision carve-out, yes — attendance your customer directs is labor performed for your customer. Check the contract for "fully burdened," "supervision," or "non-productive time" first, because any of those three phrases can change the answer.
What do I do if the GC rejects the meeting hours as overhead?Ask which contract clause he is relying on, and answer with the clause rather than with frustration. Where the language is genuinely ambiguous, the decision-sentence note turns "why are you charging me" into "which bucket does this go in," and the second conversation ends far faster.
Should a coordination meeting be one line item or folded into the day's hours?One line, always. Folding 2.03 hours of meeting into an 8.5-hour install line is what makes the whole day look padded, and it forfeits the description that would have justified it.
What about travel and wait time around the meeting?Treat it the way the contract treats the meeting itself, and write it as its own entry with its own times. "7:02a–9:04a meeting, 9:04a–9:20a walk to panel room" is checkable; "2.5 hrs meeting" is not.
Who should attend if we are billing the time?The fewest people who can actually resolve the coordination items, and note each attendee's classification because the bill rates differ. A foreman plus an apprentice standing there invites a question you have no good answer to.
How do I handle meeting hours on a lump-sum job?You usually do not bill them — coordination is priced into the bid. Log them anyway, because knowing coordination ran 3.5 hours a week on the last job is how you stop underbidding it on the next one.
The meeting produced a scope change. Change order or T&M ticket?A change order, priced and authorized before the work starts, with the same-day confirmation email as the paper trail back to the meeting. Verbal direction with no same-day confirmation is the part that gets disputed — by the time the ticket lands, the only record is two people's memory of a Tuesday morning.
Is any of this worth it if we only run a couple of T&M jobs?The five-line card and the tag convention cost nothing and take a minute a day. Software is worth discussing when retyping field notes into billing backup has become somebody's actual job; until then the card and a spreadsheet are enough.