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FieldTimesheet ties every hour to a job and calculates labor costs in real-time. See budget vs. actual while the work is happening so you can adjust before a job goes sideways.
Most electrical contractors find out a job was unprofitable after it is already done. The final invoice goes out, the expenses are tallied, and the owner discovers that the $180,000 commercial job they just finished actually cost $196,000 in labor alone. By then, there is nothing to do about it. The work is complete, the crew has moved on, and the loss is permanent. According to the Electrical Contractor Magazine's annual survey, the average electrical contractor underbids jobs by 8-12% on labor, primarily because they rely on estimates and gut feeling rather than actual cost data from previous jobs. Work that through as an example, inputs visible: a $200,000 job where labor is 45% of the value carries $90,000 of labor, so an 8-12% miss on the labor estimate is $7,200 to $10,800 the bid never accounted for. Your labor share is probably not 45% — that is the number to check first.
The root cause is simple: electrical contractors do not have real-time visibility into labor costs per job. Time might be tracked on paper or in a basic spreadsheet, but it is rarely tied to specific jobs in a way that produces actionable financial data while work is in progress. The foreman on a commercial job might know his crew is working hard, but he cannot tell you whether they are tracking ahead of the labor budget or behind it. The office might know total payroll for the week, but cannot break it down by job until someone manually allocates the hours. By the time the numbers are assembled, the job is complete and the opportunity to make mid-project adjustments has passed.
This problem compounds when you bid new work. Without accurate job cost data from completed projects, your estimates for new bids are educated guesses. You might know that a 10,000 square foot office rewire takes roughly 800 labor hours, but do you know the actual number from your last three similar projects? Most contractors do not, because extracting that data from timesheets, payroll records, and QuickBooks reports takes hours of manual analysis. So they estimate, pad the number by 10% for safety, and hope for the best. Sometimes the pad is enough. Sometimes it is not. And every time you get it wrong, you either leave money on the table by overbidding or lose money by underbidding.
Simple setup. Immediate results.
When you create a job in FieldTimesheet, you can assign an estimated labor budget in hours or dollars. For a commercial panel upgrade you estimate at 120 labor hours, enter 120 as the budget. For a T&M job with a not-to-exceed, enter the NTE hours. FieldTimesheet ties these budgets to the jobs your crew clocks into, creating the baseline for real-time cost tracking.
Every time a worker clocks in, they select which job they are working on. This ties every hour of labor directly to a project. There is no batch allocation or end-of-week assignment. If a journeyman spends 6 hours on the office rewire and 2 hours on a service call, those hours are captured separately in real-time as they happen. The labor cost is calculated automatically based on each worker's hourly rate.
Your admin dashboard displays each active job with a clear visual of labor hours consumed vs. budgeted, total labor cost vs. budget, and percent complete. If a job is trending 20% over budget at the halfway point, you see it immediately. Not next week, not at the end of the project. Right now, while there is still time to reassign crew, have a conversation with the GC about a change order, or adjust the approach.
When a job is complete, FieldTimesheet generates a job cost summary showing total labor hours by worker, cost per phase, budget variance, and labor cost per square foot or per unit. This data becomes your estimating library. The next time you bid a similar job, you are working from actual numbers, not assumptions. Over time, this data transforms your bidding accuracy from guesswork into data-driven precision.
Built specifically for electrical contractors
The expensive mistake is bidding the next job off the last job's guess. When you track actual labor against the budget on every job, the patterns surface: which work runs long, which crews are quick at which tasks, where your estimate is consistently light. That is what tightens a bid. For scale, run it as an example with the inputs visible: if labor is 45% of a $2M year, that is $900,000, and closing a 10% gap between your labor estimate and your labor actuals is $90,000. Your mix will be different. The point is that the gap is worth measuring instead of padding.
On a fixed-bid job, every hour over budget comes directly out of your profit. The earlier you catch an overrun, the more options you have: reassign a more experienced worker, negotiate a change order for scope that was not in the original bid, or simply tighten up the remaining work. Seeing that a job has consumed 70% of the labor budget at the 50% completion mark gives you the warning you need to act. Finding out at 100% completion is too late.
Not all electrical work is equally profitable. Service calls might carry 40% margins while competitive-bid commercial work runs at 12%. But without job-level cost data, many contractors treat all revenue the same. FieldTimesheet's job cost reports show you exactly where your profit comes from, so you can focus your sales efforts on the types of work that actually make you money and price the marginal work more carefully.
A master electrician billing at $95/hour and an apprentice at $45/hour produce very different labor costs on the same job. FieldTimesheet tracks each worker's rate individually, so your job cost calculations reflect the actual crew mix on each project. When you see that a job's cost per hour is $78 instead of the estimated $65, you might discover that you staffed it with too many journeymen and not enough apprentices.
When you bid against other electrical contractors, the one with the most accurate cost data usually wins. Not the lowest bid, the most accurate. Accurate bidders can price tightly on jobs they know they can execute efficiently while properly pricing the jobs that carry more risk. Over 12 months of job cost data, you build an estimating advantage that competitors using gut instinct cannot match.
Job cost data reveals crew productivity patterns that are invisible without it. You might discover that a particular two-man team consistently finishes residential rough-ins 15% faster than average, or that a certain apprentice paired with a specific journeyman produces the best results. These insights let you optimize crew assignments in ways that directly improve profitability across all your jobs.
When a GC pushes back on a T&M invoice or questions why a job took longer than expected, you have the detail to answer with instead of your memory: daily hours, who was on site, and what the running total was on any given day. Keep the internal cost view for yourself and hand over the hours-and-what-got-done version. Most of these conversations end the moment the other side can follow the arithmetic.
Construction industry data consistently shows that contractors who track job costs in real-time bid more accurately and maintain healthier margins. An ENR study found a 12% improvement in bid accuracy for contractors with real-time cost tracking compared to those relying on end-of-project reconciliation. For electrical subs bidding $100K-$500K projects, that accuracy gap can mean the difference between winning work profitably and either losing bids or winning them at a loss.
The challenge for most electrical contractors is that labor is their largest variable cost — often 40-60% of project value — and without per-job tracking, they cannot tell which types of work are profitable. Renovation and retrofit jobs frequently run 10-15% more labor-intensive than new construction due to unforeseen conditions, yet many contractors bid both using the same labor multiplier. The result: they subsidize unprofitable work with inflated bids on profitable work, losing competitive bids they should have won.
Real-time job costing changes this dynamic. When you can see labor costs accumulating against a budget while the project is still in progress, you catch overruns at week 3 instead of month-end. And when you have actual cost data from completed jobs, your future estimates are based on reality instead of gut instinct.
Labor costs are calculated by multiplying each worker's hourly rate by the hours they logged on a specific job. If a journeyman at $75/hour works 8 hours on Job A, that is $600 in labor cost for that job. FieldTimesheet sums all worker hours and costs per job automatically, giving you a running total that updates every time someone clocks in or out.
Yes. Each worker in FieldTimesheet has an individual hourly rate that you set when you add them. A master electrician can be set at $95/hour, a journeyman at $75/hour, and an apprentice at $45/hour. The job cost calculations use each worker's actual rate, so your labor cost reports reflect the true crew mix cost on every project.
FieldTimesheet does not have a direct integration with estimating software at this time. However, the job cost reports provide the exact data points that estimators need: actual labor hours per job, cost per square foot, hours by phase, and budget variance. You can export this data and use it to calibrate your estimates in whatever tool you use for bidding.
Real-time. The FieldTimesheet dashboard shows budget vs. actual labor for every active job, updated every time a worker clocks in or out. You do not need to wait until the end of the week or the end of the project to see where you stand. If a job is trending over budget, you will see it as it happens.
FieldTimesheet provides job cost reports that include: total labor hours by job, labor cost by job, budget vs. actual variance, hours by individual worker per job, and a labor cost summary across all jobs for any date range. These reports can be viewed on the dashboard and are supplemented by the data that syncs to QuickBooks for more detailed financial analysis.
After completing several jobs with FieldTimesheet, you accumulate a library of actual labor cost data organized by job type, size, and complexity. When you bid a new project similar to one you have completed, you can reference the actual hours and costs rather than relying on standard estimating guides or gut feeling. The difference is that your estimate stops being a guess with a 10% pad on it and becomes a number you can point at.
Absolutely. For T&M jobs, FieldTimesheet tracks labor hours in real-time against any not-to-exceed limits or budget caps you set. You can see exactly how many hours have been consumed and at what cost, making it easy to bill accurately and have conversations with the GC before hitting a cap. The detailed time records also provide the documentation needed for T&M invoice substantiation.
You do not need software to start. This free job costing spreadsheet takes budgeted hours, actual hours, and crew rates and shows you where a job actually landed. Do it once on a job you already finished and you will know whether your estimating is running light — and which direction to push the next bid.