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Not the invoices you lost -- the ones you won by knocking a few hundred dollars off, and the ones that sat for seven weeks while nobody wanted the phone call. Six numbers off your aging report and you can see the size of it.
Time-and-material invoices only. Leave out fixed-price contracts -- nobody argues about those the same way.
Labor plus material, as billed.
Any invoice where somebody called, emailed, or sat on it asking what a charge was for. Not just formal disputes.
The courtesy discount, the credit memo, the hours you dropped to keep the customer. Count it even when the original bill was correct.
From invoice date to money in the account, including the weeks it sat while nobody wanted the conversation.
Written off per year to end arguments
28.8 questioned invoices/yr x $400
Cash sitting in slow-paid questioned invoices
$120,960 questioned billings x 28 extra days / 365
Not a loss -- it is your money, later. This is the average balance the delay keeps out of your account, which is what you feel on payroll Friday.
Same numbers, other angles
9.5% of questioned billings, written off
$80 per invoice you send, disputed or not
144 T&M invoices/yr, 28.8 questioned
The write-off figure assumes the disputed work was performed and correctly billed. Where you were actually wrong, that part is not a documentation problem and no paperwork fixes it.
Or download the T&M Backup Kit -- spreadsheets and forms you can use with paper timesheets and no software at all.
The charge was fair. The explanation was missing.
Fixed-price work is settled before anyone picks up a tool, so the only question at the end is whether it got done. Time and material is different: the invoice arrives carrying a number the customer had no part in producing and no way to check. A line that reads 3 electricians, 47.5 hours, $4,512 asks them to trust you.
Most customers are not trying to chisel you. They are trying to reconstruct a charge, failing, and landing on the only conclusion available to them -- that the bill is padded. A GC with a budget to defend, a property manager who has to justify the spend to an owner, a homeowner who was told "probably two days": all three need to explain your invoice to somebody else. If they cannot, they push back, and the push-back arrives as a discount request or as silence for six weeks.
Every T&M dispute is one of four questions. All four can be answered on the invoice before they get asked.
One page per job, and it must be safe to hand to the customer.
Date, who was on site, in and out times, hours, your bill rate, the amount, and one line about what got done. That is the whole document. The trap is using an internal labor report for this: those show what you pay your electricians, so sending one discloses your margin and turns the conversation into a negotiation about your markup. Keep the cost report for deciding whether the job actually made money and keep a separate customer-facing packet with bill rates only.
The line about what got done is the part that does the work, and it is the part that has to come from the field. The office cannot write it a week later. Ten seconds from the electrician who terminated the circuits produces something no amount of back-office reconstruction can match -- which is also why the crew has a reason to cooperate with it. That note is what stops the company eating a $400 discount on work they performed correctly.
Three habits, in the order that pays best. Name what is billable in writing before work starts -- drive time, supply runs, material handling, meetings. Log every change the GC asks for on a handshake, even the twenty-minute ones, because those are what make an invoice look inflated. Send a note the day the estimate stops being true.
None of that requires software. The free templates here cover the authorization form, the change-order log, and a customer-facing backup sheet you can fill out by hand. If you also want to know whether the hours themselves are complete before you worry about explaining them, run the unbilled-hours arithmetic and read how T&M jobs lose money after the work is done.
Because a T&M invoice asks the customer to take your word for it. Fixed-price work is agreed up front, so the only question is whether it got done. T&M asks them to accept a number they cannot reconstruct. When a line reads three electricians, 47.5 hours, they are not able to check it, and people who cannot check a charge do not assume they are wrong -- they assume the bill is padded. Most of the time the charge was fair and the explanation was missing.
Hand over a record the customer can follow without calling you: the date, who was on site, the clock-in and clock-out times, hours at the agreed bill rate, and one line in plain trade language about what got done. Pulled and terminated circuits 12-18, second-floor east wing settles an argument. 8.77 hrs does not. The line has to come from the electrician who did the work, on the day they did it, or it turns into a guess written by the office a week later.
No. Bill rate and amount only. A labor report built for job costing shows what you pay your electricians, which means handing it to a customer discloses your margin and invites a negotiation about your markup instead of a conversation about the work. Keep two documents: an internal cost report for deciding whether a job made money, and a customer-facing packet that shows hours, bill rate, and what got done. Same hours, different columns.
Three things, and only one of them shows up in your books. First, the amount you knock off to end the conversation -- the courtesy discount or credit memo, often on work that was billed correctly. Second, the cash tied up while the invoice sits unpaid, which is your money arriving late rather than money lost. Third, the part nobody prices: the invoices that go out soft because you would rather undercount than argue again. The calculator above puts numbers on the first two from your own figures.
A timestamped on-site confirmation corroborates arrival and departure, which is usually the part being questioned. It works as a single line next to the hours -- on site, verified -- not as a map of where somebody drove all day. Handing a customer a movement trail of your employees is a privacy problem you created for yourself, and it makes the crew hostile to the record that protects them. Corroboration, not surveillance.
A billing packet with sample data, annotated to show why each element holds up when somebody questions it. Free, ungated, and useful whether you ever buy anything.
FieldTimesheet produces this packet from the hours your crew logs on their phones. 14-day trial, no card.