The crew shows up at 6:58. The switchgear doesn't.
Four electricians are standing in a second-floor electrical room with an empty housekeeping pad, a set of stub-ups, and nothing to land. Nobody on that crew bought the gear. Nobody on that crew can expedite it.
For an electrician, owner-furnished equipment delay documentation is the record made on that morning — not the letter written six weeks later, after the invoice comes back with questions on it.
The entitlement half of this is settled and boring. If the owner furnished the item and the item was late, wrong, or damaged, there is generally a path to time and money. Read your contract.
The proof half is where the hours get lost. The work was real. The explanation wasn't written down.
And an owner-furnished delay is the ugliest version of that problem, because the party that caused the delay is the same party reading your invoice.
What Counts as Owner-Furnished Equipment on an Electrical Job
Owner-furnished equipment (OFE, or OFCI — owner-furnished, contractor-installed) is any material the owner buys direct and hands to you to install. On electrical work it is almost always the long-lead, high-dollar gear.
The usual list:
- Switchgear, switchboards, panelboards, and distribution lineups
- Dry-type and pad-mounted transformers
- Generators, automatic transfer switches, and paralleling gear
- Fixture packages, especially decorative and specialty lighting
- EV charging equipment and its network hardware
- Controls, BAS panels, and head-end equipment
- Owner-supplied fire alarm devices, security, and AV head-end
- Kitchen, lab, gym, and process equipment with rough-in requirements
The second reason is the one that bites you. When the owner buys early to protect the schedule and the delivery slips anyway, the schedule they were protecting is yours.
Who Pays When Owner-Furnished Equipment Shows Up Late?
When owner-furnished equipment shows up late, the owner generally pays the resulting labor impact — but only for the hours your daily records can prove. Entitlement gets you a hearing; the daily record gets you the money.
Most standard forms treat a late owner-furnished item as an owner-caused delay, which means it is usually both excusable (you get time) and compensable (you get cost). That is the easy part, and it is not what you came here for.
Here is the hard part. Nobody at the GC's office is going to reconstruct your week for you.
Your claim gets evaluated against whatever your field wrote down while it was happening. Where the record is silent, the reviewer's default assumption is that nothing unusual happened that day.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. The charge was fair. The explanation was missing.
A line on a timesheet reading 8.0 hrs survives payroll and loses this argument. A line reading Tue 6:58a–3:12p — switchgear not on site, crew pulled to Area C feeders, 4 men idle 2.5 hrs awaiting delivery ends it.
The Four Ways an OFE Delay Actually Costs Hours
An owner-furnished delay rarely shows up as one clean idle day. It shows up as four separate leaks, and three of them are invisible on a normal timesheet.
1. Idle time on site. The crew reported, there is no alternate work face in that area, and they wait. This is the only one that looks obviously abnormal in your records — and even then, only if someone wrote down why. 2. Redeployment and out-of-sequence work. The foreman doesn't send four electricians home over a delivery. He moves them to whatever else is open, usually work that was scheduled for six weeks from now. Those hours look completely normal on paper. 3. Rehandling and double-handling. Gear lands early into the wrong bay, gets moved for a slab pour, gets moved again for the tie-in. Or it lands damaged and you offload, inspect, tarp, and re-crate it. 4. Remobilization and the squeeze at the end. When the gear finally arrives, you re-staff, re-stage, re-scaffold — and you install it inside a smaller window with three other trades in the same room.That fourth one is where the real money is, and it is the hardest to collect. Electrical estimators work from published labor units and impact factors — NECA's for electrical work, and the widely cited Mechanical Contractors Association of America tables for the same conditions: stacking of trades, reassignment of manpower, out-of-sequence work, dilution of supervision.
Those tables only help you if your daily records establish that the conditions existed. AACE International Recommended Practice 25R-03, on estimating lost labor productivity, ranks the "measured mile" — comparing an unimpacted stretch of the same work to the impacted stretch — among the most widely accepted methods. Both approaches are built on contemporaneous field records. Neither works on memory.
What a Delay Day Has to Say to Get Paid
A defensible delay entry names the date and clock times, the crew, the exact location, the specific item that was missing, what work it blocked, what the crew did instead, and who was told when.
Nine things. Write all nine and the day is bulletproof; skip three and it is an assertion.
- Date and day of week. Written that day, not backfilled.
- Clock times, in and out. Not "8 hrs."
6:58a–3:12p. - Names and count. "4 electricians — R. Hale, D. Ortiz, M. Feld, J. Ruiz."
- Exact location. "Level 2 electrical room 214," not "the building."
- The specific item, by tag. "Owner-furnished switchgear lineup SWBD-2A." Tag numbers beat nouns.
- What it blocked. "Set and terminate SWBD-2A; no alternate work face in room."
- What the crew did instead, and when they moved. "Redeployed 9:28a to Area C feeder pulls, circuits 41–56."
- Idle hours, stated as a number. "2.5 hrs idle per man before redeployment."
- Who was notified, how, and at what time. "GC superintendent notified 7:15a, site trailer, in person; email sent 7:41a."
| Weak entry (loses the argument) | Defensible entry (ends it) |
|---|---|
9/8 — 8.0 hrs — electrical |
Tue 9/8, 6:58a–3:12p. 4 electricians (Hale, Ortiz, Feld, Ruiz), Level 2 elec. room 214. Owner-furnished switchgear SWBD-2A not delivered; no alternate work face in room. GC super notified 7:15a in trailer, email 7:41a. Crew idle 2.5 hrs, redeployed 9:28a to Area C feeder pulls, circuits 41–56. |
9/14 — 12 hrs misc labor |
Mon 9/14, 6:55a–1:25p, 30-min lunch. 2 electricians, Bay 3 laydown to east dock. Relocated 12 sections owner-furnished switchgear, second move; original position required for slab pour per GC direction 9/11. 2 men × 6.0 hrs = 12.0 man-hrs rehandling. |
Same day. Same men. Same hours. Same charge on the invoice.
One of those gets discounted in a meeting. The other one gets paid, because there is nothing left to argue about.
Idle or Redeployed: The Hours That Quietly Disappear
Redeployed hours are the ones that vanish. Idle hours at least look strange on a timesheet; redeployed hours look like a productive Tuesday.
This is the defining problem for an electrical sub, because your foreman is measured on keeping men productive and your claim is measured on proving they were not. He is good at his job, so he does not stand four men in an empty gear room for eight hours. He finds them work.
That decision saves the owner money and destroys your claim, unless somebody writes the second half of the sentence.
The rule is simple: every redeployment gets a "from" and a "to."
Not "pulled feeders in Area C." Instead: "Could not set SWBD-2A, gear not delivered; pulled feeders in Area C instead, circuits 41–56, work originally scheduled week of 10/19."
That one phrase — instead of, because — is what converts a normal-looking day into an impacted day six weeks later. It costs the foreman one more clause at the end of a sentence he was already writing.
Notice: The Step That Loses Claims That Were Otherwise Good
Most contracts require written notice of a delay within a set number of days, and most of them say that failing to give it waives the claim. That is where a valid OFE claim dies on a technicality rather than on the facts — not because the hours weren't real, but because the notice went out late.
Go find your number before you need it. The AIA A201 general conditions, the most common form on commercial work, require a claim to be initiated by written notice within 21 days after the event giving rise to it (§15.1.3 in the 2017 edition), and ConsensusDocs 200 carries its own notice provision on its own clock. Whichever form your job runs on, that number is in the contract sitting on your desk and it takes five minutes to find. Your contract governs, and this is general information, not legal advice.
Send notice the morning it happens, not the week you figure out what it cost. Notice of a delay is not a claim for money; it is a heads-up that preserves your right to make one later.
Send it to whoever your contract names, in the form it names — usually the GC in writing, with the CM or owner's rep copied if your contract says so. A verbal to the super in the trailer is worth having, and is worth nothing by itself.
Five things a notice has to contain: the item, the date it was needed, the date and time you observed it missing, the crew and area affected, and a statement that you are tracking impact.
Here is wording you can copy today. It is deliberately boring, which is the point.
Subject: Notice of delay — owner-furnished switchgear SWBD-2A, Job 24-118>
As of 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, September 8, owner-furnished switchgear lineup SWBD-2A has not been delivered to the site. Four electricians reported to the Level 2 electrical room to set and terminate this equipment per the current schedule and have no alternate work face in that area.>
We are recording affected crew hours on our daily field reports beginning today and will submit a request for time and cost impact once a revised delivery date is confirmed. Please advise on the delivery date and on any direction you want us to follow in the interim.>
[Company] — [Name, title] — sent 7:41 a.m., 9/8
Send the same note again when the gear lands, when it lands damaged, and when the sequence changes. Three short emails beat one long letter written in November.
How Do You Price an Owner-Furnished Equipment Delay?
You price an owner-furnished equipment delay in four buckets — idle time, rehandling, remobilization, and out-of-sequence inefficiency — and you show your inputs for each one.
Below is a labeled example on a made-up job. Every input is visible so you can drop in your own crew size, hours, and rate. It is not a claim about what your delay cost; it is arithmetic you can re-run.
The 64 redeployed hours in line four are the same crew's next two full shifts — 9/9 and 9/10 — spent on Area C feeder work pulled forward from October: 4 men × 2 shifts × 8 hrs. The 2.5 idle hours from 9/8 sit in line one, so nothing is counted twice.
| Impact | Inputs (example) | Man-hours | At $95/hr bill rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Idle on site, day of non-delivery | 4 electricians × 2.5 hrs | 10.0 | $950 |
| Rehandling gear (second move) | 2 electricians × 6 hrs | 12.0 | $1,140 |
| Remobilization when gear arrives | 4 electricians × 2 hrs | 8.0 | $760 |
| Out-of-sequence inefficiency | 64 redeployed hrs (4 men × 2 shifts × 8 hrs) × 15% — illustrative; condition: out-of-sequence work / reassignment of manpower | 9.6 | $912 |
| Example total | Illustrative inputs only | 39.6 | $3,762 |
Two honest notes on that table.
The first three lines are hard numbers straight off your daily reports, and they are the ones a GC will usually pay without much fight.
The fourth line — the productivity factor — is the one that gets challenged. Bring it anyway, label the factor and where it came from, and expect to negotiate it. The 15% above is an illustrative placeholder, not a recommendation: pull the condition and the percentage you actually apply from the published labor-factor tables — NECA's for electrical work, or the MCAA tables — and cite that condition by name in your claim. If your records are strong on lines one through three, you have far more credibility arguing line four.
If you want to see what the arguing costs you in a year — what gets written off to settle questioned invoices, and what sits unpaid while the argument runs — there is an invoice dispute calculator that runs that arithmetic with your own inputs.
Standing By or Sending Them Home
Two defensible calls, and the record looks the same either way.
Stand by when a delivery is confirmed for later that day, when demobilizing costs more than the wait, or when the GC directs you to hold the crew. Write down the direction and who gave it. Send them home or redeploy when there is no confirmed delivery, when there is genuinely open work elsewhere, or when the wait exceeds a few hours. Write down the release time and the reason.What you cannot do is make the call and leave it unwritten. An unexplained short day reads as your problem; a documented release reads as mitigation, which is exactly what a reviewer wants to see you doing.
Getting the Crew to Write the Line
This is the actual obstacle, and it is not paperwork discipline. It is that nobody has told the crew what the line is for.
"Fill out your daily report" gets you misc electrical. "Write what you did so the owner can't chisel us on hours we actually worked" gets you circuit numbers. The record protects the crew — it is what stops a customer disputing work they performed.
Three things that work in the field:
One line, one man, one day. Not a form. One sentence naming the area, the activity, and what stopped it, if anything. The foreman asks at the truck, not at the office. Thirty seconds at 3:15, while it is fresh. "What'd you get done, and what got in your way?" The second half of that question is where delay documentation comes from. Give them the vocabulary. Post three example lines in the gang box. People copy the format they are shown.How you capture it matters less than that it exists. A field report pad and a carpenter pencil, photographed and texted to the office, is a complete system. A time app that asks "what did you work on?" at clock-out and prints the answer on the job-labor report and the customer billing packet does the same job — that is what FieldTimesheet is built to do — but a paper daily report signed by the foreman is admissible, contemporaneous, and free.
What is not a system: reconstructing the month from memory on the 30th. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
What the Finished Backup Packet Looks Like
Assemble it in the order a stranger would read it, and send it with the invoice, not after somebody asks.
- Cover sheet — job name and number, the item by tag, the dates covered, total impacted man-hours.
- The notice trail — copies of the emails, in date order, with send times visible.
- Daily field reports — one page per affected day, the nine elements filled in.
- Labor backup sheet — date, name, in/out, hours, area, and the note, one line per man per day, totaled.
- Delivery record — the packing slip or receiving log with the actual delivery date, plus any damage or nonconformance notes.
- The arithmetic — the same four-bucket table as above, with your real inputs.
The T&M Billing Backup Kit has the daily field report, the labor backup sheet, the change order log, and the T&M work authorization as free downloads — no signup. Those four forms cover items 3, 4, and most of 1. If you want to see how the finished labor page reads to the person paying it, there is an annotated sample billing packet with the same structure, and the general rules for T&M invoice backup apply here too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it change if the GC, not the owner, bought the gear?
A late item bought by the GC is a GC-caused delay rather than an owner-caused one, and it runs through your subcontract instead of the prime contract. The field record you need is identical: the item by tag, the date and time you found it missing, the crew and area affected, the idle and redeployed hours, and who you notified. What changes is who gets the notice and which contract's notice window applies to you.
Can I bill for idle crew time, or only for hours we actually worked?
Idle time on site is normally billable as a labor impact when it was caused by the owner and you documented it. The catch is that "documented" means the day, the men, the hours, the reason, and the notification — not a line reading "standby."
How much notice do I have to give when owner-furnished gear is late?
Notice deadlines for a late owner-furnished item are set by your contract, and many forms require written notice within a short window with waiver language attached. Practical rule: send a short written notice the morning you observe it, then supplement as facts develop. This is general information, not legal advice.
We redeployed the crew instead of sending them home. Is that still a claim?
Redeployed hours are still claimable — and they are the impact most likely to go unclaimed, because they do not look like an impact on a timesheet. The entry has to say what the crew could not do and what they did instead; the "instead of, because" clause is the whole difference.
What if the owner-furnished equipment arrived on time but was damaged or wrong?
A damaged or nonconforming owner-furnished item is treated exactly like a non-delivery, and it should be documented faster. Note the receiving date and time, the condition, the specific deficiency, who inspected it, and who you notified — before anything gets uncrated further or moved.
What proof does a GC actually accept for a labor impact claim?
A GC accepts contemporaneous, specific, dated records: daily field reports naming area and activity, labor records showing hours by man by day, the notice emails with timestamps, and the delivery documentation. Records written after the fact get discounted, and everyone in the process knows why.
Do I need an approved change order before I bill the extra hours?
Billing extra hours usually requires at least a written directive or an acknowledged request, and billing ahead of one invites a rejection. Document and notice immediately regardless — the paperwork can be papered later, but the field record cannot be recreated later.
How long should I keep owner-furnished equipment delay records?
Keep owner-furnished delay records at least as long as your contract's claim and warranty periods, and longer where your state's statute of limitations for contract actions runs longer. Scanning the daily reports weekly costs nothing and outlives the job trailer.
None of this requires software. It requires nine facts, written the day they happen, by the man who was standing there.
The gear was the owner's. The delay was the owner's. Your record is what makes that a paragraph the owner can read instead of a number the owner can dispute.