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Four inputs, one multiplication. The total below is arithmetic on the numbers you type, not our estimate of your business. Change any input and watch it move.
Electricians who log hours against jobs.
What the customer pays per hour -- not what you pay the electrician.
The one input worth auditing. If your crew already logs drive time and supply-house runs, set it low.
per year
($3,125/month)
The formula
10 workers x $75/hr x 1 hrs/week x 50 weeks
= 500 unlogged hours/year
Assumptions baked in: every unlogged hour would have been billable under your contract, and the customer would have paid it. Where that is not true, the real number is lower.
Then come back and set the third input to what you found.
Recovering the hour is half the job.
An hour with no explanation attached is the line item your customer argues about. See what a customer-ready record looks like, then decide whether you need software for it.
Or grab the T&M Backup Kit -- free spreadsheets, no account. Prefer to try the app? 14-day trial, no card.
It multiplies four numbers you supply. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being blunt about the limits.
Workers x bill rate x unlogged hours per worker per week x working weeks per year. Nothing is measured, sampled, or inferred from your business. If you enter a guess for unlogged hours, the total is that guess multiplied by 700. That is not a reason to skip it -- it is a reason to check the third input before you trust the answer.
Worked example so you can see the shape of it: 14 electricians, a $95/hour bill rate, one unlogged hour each per week, 50 working weeks. That comes to $66,500 for the year. Those four numbers are ours, chosen to be plausible for a mid-size shop. They are not a finding about your crew or anyone else's.
To sanity-check your own third input, pick one week and compare each electrician's logged hours against the first hard signal of each day: the text from the jobsite, the supply-house receipt, the GC's gate log. A single lost timecard runs about $500 in labor nobody billed, and one week of that comparison will tell you more than any benchmark.
Five categories cover most of it, and none of them are about anyone stealing time.
The pattern underneath all five: the hour is recorded later, from memory, by someone whose day has moved on. Drive time versus wrench time covers the first one in detail, and capturing time on the phone covers why the moment matters more than the tool.
An hour you cannot explain is the line item your customer pushes back on.
Put the recovered hour on a T&M invoice and you have asked the customer to take your word for it. When they cannot reconstruct the charge, they do not conclude they must be wrong. They conclude the invoice is padded, and then you either discount work you actually performed or win the argument and lose the relationship.
The fix is the same piece of work, done once. 8.77 hrs survives payroll and loses a dispute. Thu 7:02a-3:48p, pulled and terminated circuits 12-18, second-floor east wing ends the conversation. One line from the electrician who did the work turns an hours total into an answer.
If the argument is the part costing you money, run the invoice-dispute arithmetic and read how T&M jobs lose money after the work is done.
Three changes, none of which require software, in the order that pays best.
One: settle what is billable, in writing, at the estimate. Drive time, supply-house runs, material handling, meetings. Name them in the work authorization. Half of what gets written off later was never agreed to in the first place.
Two: move the recording to the point of work. Whatever the crew uses -- paper on the dash, a group text, a shared sheet -- the entry has to happen when the hour happens. End-of-week reconstruction is where the rounding lives.
Three: ask for one line about what got done. Not a report. One line, in trade language, naming the circuits or the room or the panel. That line is what makes the hour defensible later, and it is the part the crew will actually cooperate with once they understand it protects the company's money.
The free spreadsheet templates on this site do all three with no account and no software. FieldTimesheet exists to make step two take one tap and step three take ten seconds, and tie every hour to a job while it is still open. That is the only pitch on this page.
Four numbers, multiplied: how many electricians you have, the rate you bill the customer per hour, how many hours per worker per week never make it onto a timesheet, and how many weeks a year you work. Worked example, not a claim about anyone's shop: 14 electricians x $95/hour x 1 unlogged hour each per week x 50 weeks = $66,500. Every one of those four inputs is an assumption until you check it against your own records, so change them to yours.
Nobody can tell you that without looking at your records, and any number quoted at you is a guess dressed up as research. Audit it instead. Take last week, pull each electrician's logged hours, and compare them against the first and last real signal of each day: the text they sent from the jobsite, the supply-house receipt timestamp, the GC's gate log, the photo they took of the panel. The gap between the first signal and the first logged hour is your answer, and it is usually the drive and the walk-in. Do that for one week and you can stop guessing at the third input in this calculator.
Whatever your contract says counts, which is why so much of this is lost before anyone forgets to write it down. Drive time between sites, supply-house runs, material handling, and jobsite meetings are all commonly billable on T&M work and all commonly assumed by the customer to be included in the hourly rate. If the contract or the work authorization does not spell it out, the customer will read it the way that costs them less, and they will be arguing in good faith. Settle it in writing at the estimate, before there is an invoice to fight about.
Partly, and not first. The biggest part of this is a process problem you can fix for free: decide what is billable, put it in the contract, and ask the crew for one line about what got done at the end of the shift. Paper works if it is filled out at the point of work. It fails because it is filled out at the end of the week from memory, and memory rounds down. Software helps because the phone is already in their hand at the moment the hour happens, which is the only moment the record is accurate. FieldTimesheet does that, and you can also do it with a shared spreadsheet and a habit.
Because an hour with no explanation attached is the line item people push back on. A timesheet that reads 8.77 hrs survives payroll and loses an invoice dispute. A record that reads Thu 7:02a-3:48p, pulled and terminated circuits 12-18, second-floor east wing ends the conversation before it starts. Capturing the hour and explaining the hour are the same piece of work, done once, in the field. The invoice-dispute calculator on this site puts numbers on the second half of that.
The arithmetic tells you the size of the gap. The billing packet shows you what closes it: hours a customer can follow, with a line about what got done next to each one. Sample data, annotated, nothing to sign up for.
Both are free and ungated. If you want the software that produces them, start a 14-day trial -- no card.