Every electrical contractor loses money to forgotten hours, missed drive time, and undocumented change orders. Use this calculator to see your annual revenue leakage.
How many electricians on your crew?
What do you charge customers per hour?
Drive time, quick fixes, extra work not logged. Industry average: 1-2 hours.
per year
($3,125/month)
The Math:
10 workers x $75/hr x 1 hrs/week x 50 weeks
Most electrical contractors lose $25,000-$75,000 per year in revenue that was earned but never billed.
The math is straightforward. A 10-person crew at $75/hour loses $37,500 annually from just one unbilled hour per worker per week. That number scales with crew size and billing rate.
The problem is not lazy workers. It is a broken recording system. Paper timesheets get filled out at the end of the day from memory. By then, the 20-minute drive, the early morning start, and the quick change order are already forgotten.
A single lost timecard costs an average of $500 in unbilled labor. Multiply that across a crew over a full year, and the revenue leakage becomes a serious threat to profitability.
It multiplies four variables to estimate your total annual revenue leakage from missed billable time.
Enter your number of workers, average billing rate, estimated missed hours per worker per week, and working weeks per year. The formula is simple: Workers x Rate x Missed Hours x Weeks = Annual Loss.
The default value of one missed hour per worker per week is based on industry research into construction time tracking accuracy. Many crews lose closer to two hours when you account for drive time, early arrivals, and undocumented extras.
Adjust the inputs to match your operation. Even half an hour per worker per week adds up to thousands in lost revenue over a year. The complete time tracking guide explains how to identify and recover these hidden costs.
Five categories account for the majority of missed billable time on electrical job sites.
Read more about how overtime surprises eat contractor margins and why mobile time tracking captures what paper misses.
The fix is capturing time at the point of work instead of reconstructing it later from memory.
Mobile clock-in replaces end-of-day guesswork with real-time recording. Your crew taps one button when they arrive and one button when they leave. No paper. No memory. No lost hours.
Pairing that with real-time job costing means every hour ties to a specific job and customer. You see labor vs. budget before the job ends, not after.
When time entries sync directly to QuickBooks, double-entry disappears. The office stops chasing timesheets and starts sending invoices with every hour accounted for.
A 10-person electrical crew billing $75/hour typically loses $37,500 per year from just one missed hour per worker per week. Larger crews or higher billing rates increase that number fast. The losses come from drive time, early arrivals, quick fixes, and change orders that never make it onto a timesheet.
Most electrical contractors see 20-30x ROI on time tracking software. At $125-175/month for FieldTimesheet, recovering even two extra billable hours per week across your crew covers the cost several times over. The real savings come from stopping chronic revenue leakage, not one-time gains.
The calculator multiplies four inputs: number of workers, average billing rate per hour, estimated missed hours per worker per week, and working weeks per year. The formula is Workers x Rate x Missed Hours x Weeks. Industry research shows 1-2 missed hours per worker per week is typical for crews using paper timesheets.
The top five sources are: drive time between job sites that never gets logged, early arrivals and late departures rounded down on paper timesheets, small change orders completed without documentation, quick troubleshooting calls handled off-the-clock, and material pickup runs billed as non-work time.
Yes. Switching from paper timesheets to mobile time tracking typically recovers 3-8% of billable hours that were previously missed. For a crew billing $500,000/year in labor, that represents $15,000-$40,000 in recovered revenue. The key is capturing hours at the point of work, not reconstructing them later.