The GC's PM calls about the pay application. Line 4 is second-floor lighting. He wants to know why that line ran what it ran, and he wants it before Friday.
Breaking out electrical contractor labor hours by floor and system is two questions in one grid, and most job records can only answer half of one. The estimate had a number for second-floor lighting. The timesheets have a column of hours with nobody's floor and nobody's system on them.
The charge was almost certainly fair. The explanation is what went missing.
This is the field side of the problem — the record of hours already worked, sorted by area and by system, built from what the crew wrote down. Everything below works with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, or software. Nothing here requires buying anything.
What a floor-and-system breakout actually is
A floor-and-system breakout is a two-axis grid. Location runs down the side — floor, wing, zone, riser, gear room. System runs across the top — lighting, power and branch circuits, fire alarm, data and low-voltage, gear and distribution, controls.
Every hour worked belongs in exactly one cell. "112 hours on the third floor" is not a breakout. "Third floor: 52 lighting, 44 power, 10 fire alarm, 6 data" is.
Most contractors already own a version of this grid. It is in the estimate.
Published labor-unit guidance is entirely about that estimating side. Electrical Construction & Maintenance puts multi-story adjustments at roughly +1% for floors 3-6 and +13% for floors 20-30 — you inflate the bid because the ninth floor costs more than the first.
That advice assumes you have job-cost history proving your own factors. It never says where that history comes from. This article is about where it comes from.
Why the estimate's breakout dies at the timesheet
The estimate is cut by floor and by system because that is how the work was quantified. Then the crew writes "8" on a card and every distinction the estimator made is gone.
At closeout you cannot answer either question that matters. Internally: did the third floor actually run over, or does it just feel that way? To the customer: what exactly is behind the third-floor lighting line?
An estimate carried out to two decimals, reconciled against an undifferentiated pile of hours, is not a variance report. It is a guess with a decimal point.
The fix is not more software. It is deciding, before the job starts, which cell each hour is going to land in — and getting three words out of the electrician at the end of the day.
The grid: floors down, systems across
Here is one week on a four-story office fit-out. Six electricians, six days, 292 hours. These are labeled example numbers, not a real project.
| Area | Lighting | Power / branch | Fire alarm | Data / LV | Total |
|---|
| 2nd floor | 46 | 38 | 12 | 8 | 104 |
| 3rd floor | 52 | 44 | 10 | 6 | 112 |
| 4th floor | 28 | 20 | 0 | 4 | 52 |
| Gear room / riser | 0 | 12 | 6 | 6 | 24 |
| Total | 126 | 114 | 28 | 24 | 292 |
Read it down a column and you get system productivity across the building. Read it across a row and you get one floor's whole story.
That grid is the deliverable. Everything else in this article is either how to fill it in or what to do with it once it is full.
Four areas by four systems is 16 cells. Hold on to that count — how many buckets a crew will still pick correctly is the constraint that decides the rest of this.
Two ways to structure it: floor-as-job or system-as-job
Pick the axis your money is cut by. If the schedule of values pays you by floor, floors are your jobs. If it pays you by system, systems are your jobs.
| Floor-as-job | System-as-job | |
|---|---|---|
| Job list looks like | Tower — 2nd flr, Tower — 3rd flr, Tower — gear room | Tower — lighting, Tower — power, Tower — fire alarm |
| Wins when | The SOV or pay app is cut by floor; disputes arrive as "why did floor 3 cost more than floor 2" | The SOV is cut by system; the fire alarm scope is a separate contract or a separate sub |
| Second axis comes from | The system named in the crew's note | The floor named in the crew's note |
| Weak spot | System totals across the building take a sort to assemble | You cannot answer a floor question without reading notes |
| Job count on a 6-floor job | 6-8 | 4-6 |
Do not try to make both axes into jobs. Six floors times five systems is 30 job codes, and a foreman standing on a lift at 6:45 a.m. will pick whatever is at the top of the list.
One axis in the job. One axis in the note. That is the whole trick, and it holds whether the record lives on paper, in a spreadsheet, or on a phone.
If you want the wider job-costing setup around this — budgets, rates, where the numbers land — job costing for electricians covers the frame this grid sits inside.
What the electrician actually writes down
Three fields, in this order: area — system — what got done. Nothing else, and no more than a sentence.
Give the crew the format on a card and it takes about thirty seconds at the end of the day:
3rd flr east — lighting — laid out and hung 22 troffers in the open office ceiling2nd flr west — power — set and wired 6 recepts and 2 quad boxes, north wallGear room — fire alarm — pulled and landed NAC circuits to FACP, terminatedCompare that to the alternative. 8.77 hrs is a number nobody can check. The line above is a number, a location, a system, and a description that a PM can walk out and verify against the ceiling grid.
That is why the note is worth the thirty seconds. It is simultaneously the floor breakout, the system breakout, and the sentence that ends an argument about the invoice.
Software helps at exactly one step here — capture. FieldTimesheet, for example, puts a "what did you work on?" box in front of the electrician at clock-out and keeps that note attached to the hours; it has no cost-code field, no floor field and no system field, so the grid is still yours to build from the notes. A carbonless daily field report with the same three fields does the same job for the price of a pad.
The T&M Billing Backup Kit has a labor backup sheet and a daily field report built around a wide work-description column on every line — write the area and the system as the first words in that column and one field carries all three. Free, no signup.
When one electrician works three floors in one day
Split the day at the point the man changed floors, and round to the quarter hour. Two rows, two notes, one date.
9/2 — R. Alvarez — 2nd flr west — power — set and wired 6 recepts, a.m. — 4.09/2 — R. Alvarez — 4th flr east — power — rough-in at north wall, p.m. — 4.5If your record only holds one line per man per day, write the split into the note itself: 2nd flr west power a.m. (4.0); 4th flr east power p.m. (4.5). Ugly, and it still sorts.
Be honest about what nothing will do for you. No product splits a mixed day for you: GPS puts the man at the address, not on the third floor, and nothing on the market can tell the second floor from the third, or lighting from fire alarm. Either the man names the split, or somebody guesses at it in the office two weeks later.
That guess is where floor-by-floor reports quietly turn into fiction. A single cell of the grid that got a whole crew's day dumped into it will look fine on a printout and be wrong.
Example arithmetic: six electricians, 15 minutes a day each that lands in no named area, over a six-day week is 9 hours (6 × 0.25 × 6). At a $95/hr bill rate that is $855 of the week with no home on the grid. Run it with your own crew size and rate.Worked example: estimated against actual, by area
Now put the estimate next to the grid. Same labeled example week as above.
| Area | Estimated hrs (this scope) | Actual hrs | Variance | What the notes say |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2nd floor | 96 | 104 | +8 | Fire alarm started early to hold the inspection date |
| 3rd floor | 96 | 112 | +16 | Lighting layout reworked around relocated ductwork |
| 4th floor | 60 | 52 | -8 | Ceiling not released; crew pulled to 3rd |
| Gear room / riser | 30 | 24 | -6 | Gear set clean, no rework |
| Total | 282 | 292 | +10 |
The +10 on the bottom line is nearly meaningless on its own — 3.5% on a week, inside anybody's noise.
The +16 on the third floor is the number worth knowing, and the note tells you it was duct interference, not slow hands. That is a change-order conversation, not a productivity problem.
It also tells you what to expect on floors five and six if the same ductwork detail repeats. This is the loop the estimating manuals ask for and never explain how to close.
Turning the breakout into backup a GC will accept
Hand over the same hours in a different shape. Date, who, what got done, hours, bill rate, amount. Nothing else.
Third-floor lighting from the example week:
| Date | Worker | Area / system — work performed | Hours | Bill rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 8/31 | R. Alvarez | 3rd flr east / lighting — laid out and hung 22 troffers, open office | 8.5 | $95 | $807.50 |
| Mon 8/31 | D. Pham | 3rd flr east / lighting — pulled ckts 12-18 to panel 3LA | 8.5 | $95 | $807.50 |
| Tue 9/1 | R. Alvarez | 3rd flr east / lighting — terminated ckts 12-18, tested | 8.0 | $95 | $760.00 |
| Wed 9/2 | D. Pham | 3rd flr west / lighting — reworked layout at relocated duct run | 9.0 | $95 | $855.00 |
| Thu 9/3 | R. Alvarez | 3rd flr west / lighting — hung 18 troffers, whips to grid | 9.0 | $95 | $855.00 |
| Fri 9/4 | D. Pham | 3rd flr west / lighting — emergency fixtures, circuited to 3LE | 9.0 | $95 | $855.00 |
| Total — 3rd floor lighting | 52.0 | $4,940.00 | |||
Notice what is not on that page: no wage rate, no burden, no labor cost, no margin. The bill rate is the only rate a customer ever sees, and mixing the two on one document is how a fair markup turns into an argument about your books.
Notice what is on it: six lines a PM can walk the floor and check. A sample billing packet shows the same idea assembled end to end.
If the GC pays on AIA G702/G703, this table is the attachment behind one G703 line. If the work is T&M, it is the ticket. Same grid, same notes, two different covers.
How many buckets before the crew stops using them
Four areas by four systems — 16 combinations — is a sensible place to stop. That is a rule of thumb rather than a measured limit, and the reason behind it is mechanical: a foreman picking from a short list at 6:45 a.m. on a lift picks the right one, and a foreman picking from thirty picks whatever is at the top.
Six floors by five systems is 30. At that point the record stops being a record and becomes a dropdown people clear as fast as possible.
Keep the job list to one axis and let the note carry the other. The note has no dropdown to get wrong — the man writes where he was and what he touched, in his own words.
Add the third axis — rough-in, gear set, trim, punch — only when the schedule of values pays by phase. On a fit-out where rough-in and trim are billed as one line, tracking them separately is work you do not get paid for.
Frequently asked questions
How do I break out electrical labor hours by floor and by system on the same job? Put one axis in the job structure and the other in the field note. Make each floor its own job (or each system, if that is how you bill), then require the note to name the other axis: "3rd flr east — lighting — pulled and terminated ckts 12-18." Sort by job for one axis, filter the notes for the other. Do I need cost codes to break labor out by floor and system? No. Cost codes are one way to carry the location and system, and they work when the code list is short and the crew picks correctly every time. A job named the way you bill plus a one-line note gets you the same grid with nothing to misclassify at 6:45 a.m. Should each floor be its own job, or a phase inside one job? Separate jobs when the customer or the SOV treats floors as separate line items — that keeps hours, budgets, and billing aligned without a second sort. Keep one job with floors in the notes when the whole building is a single lump-sum line and the breakout is only for your own history. How do I handle one electrician who works three floors in the same day? Split the day at each move and round to the quarter hour, with a separate line and note for each area. If your record only holds one entry per day, write the split inside the note itself. No product can tell the second floor from the third, so the man has to name the split while he still remembers it. What is the difference between a phase breakout and a system breakout? Phase is when the work happened in the sequence — rough-in, wire pull, gear set, trim, punch. System is what the work was — lighting, power, fire alarm, data, controls. A phase breakout cannot answer "how many hours on fire alarm, third floor," which is usually the question the GC is actually asking. How do I back up one floor's T&M line when the customer disputes it? Print the hours for that floor as date, worker, what got done, hours, bill rate, amount — and nothing else. Six lines that name circuits, fixtures, and rooms end the conversation faster than any total, because the PM can walk out and verify them. If you want to price out what those conversations cost before you build the packet, the invoice dispute calculator runs the arithmetic with your own inputs. Can QuickBooks break out labor hours by floor? Only as well as the hours are labeled before they get there. QuickBooks Online separates time by customer or project, and by class on the plans that include class tracking, so a floor can be a project or a class if you set it up that way. If the hours land as one lump per day with no floor named, no accounting system can split them after the fact. How granular is too granular? Four areas by four systems — 16 combinations — is a workable rule of thumb, not a measured limit. The mechanism is what decides it: a foreman picking from a short list at 6:45 a.m. on a lift picks the right bucket, and a foreman picking from thirty picks whatever is at the top. Past that point the buckets stop reflecting the work and start reflecting which option was easiest to tap, and a grid built on those numbers is worse than no grid at all.The short version
Cut the job list along the axis your money is cut by. Get the other axis out of the crew in one sentence at the end of the day. Add the hours into the grid weekly, while anyone still remembers what happened.
Do that, and the answer to "why did the third floor run more than the second" already exists on paper before the question gets asked. That is the whole point — not proving anybody worked, but explaining the charge so plainly that nobody has to take your word for it.