T&M Billing Backup Kit

What This Kit Is For

Every other timesheet template is for you. This one is for the person reading your invoice.

A time and material invoice asks the customer to take your word for it. Three electricians, two days, a number at the bottom. When the property manager cannot reconstruct that number, they do not conclude that they must be missing something. They conclude they are being padded. Then one of two things happens: you write off four hundred dollars of work you actually performed to keep the account, or you win the argument and lose the relationship.

The charge was usually fair. The explanation was missing. These four forms produce the explanation, and they work with a clipboard and a pen.

The Field Note Is the Whole Mechanism

Whatever your crew writes down is what your customer ends up reading.

Contractors treat these as two separate problems: getting the crew to record hours, and getting customers to stop fighting invoices. They are the same problem. A record that says 8.77 hrs survives payroll and loses a billing dispute. A record that says Thu 7:02a–3:48p — pulled and terminated circuits 12–18, second-floor east wing ends the dispute before it starts. Same hour of work. Two completely different documents.

That is also why the usual pitch to the crew fails. “Clock in so I can see where you are” gets resistance, and it should. The honest version is different: the note is what keeps the customer from chiseling hours off work the crew already did. It puts the field on the same side as the office. An electrician who understands that the line he writes is what protects his hours will write the line.

Ask for one sentence, not a paragraph. Compare:

• Weak: Electrical. Rough-in. Worked on second floor.
• Strong: Ran 3/4 inch EMT from panel LP-2 to the east wall, pulled and terminated circuits 12–18.
• Strong: Hung and wired 14 2x4 LED troffers, updated the panel directory.
• Strong: Megger test and circuit verification with the building engineer present, tenant walkthrough and punch list.

Name the room. Name the panel. Name the circuit numbers. Give the count. A description that specific is almost never argued with, because there is nothing left to wonder about. And get it the same day — by Friday nobody remembers Tuesday.

How to Fill Out the Kit

The order matters more than the forms do.

1. Get the work authorization signed first — Fill in scope, exclusions, bill rates by classification, and the other billable items. Read the rates section and the billable items section out loud with the customer before the first hour is worked.
2. Collect one specific line from each worker each day — On the daily field report, write what each person actually worked on: the room, the panel, the circuit numbers, the count. Get it the same day, not on Friday.
3. Log out-of-scope requests as they happen — Put every request that is not in the signed scope on the change order log, including verbal go-aheads. Name the person who asked and the drawing or contract line showing it was not included.
4. Build the labor backup sheet from the daily reports — Copy each worker, day, and work description onto the labor backup sheet. Apply the bill rate from the work authorization. Amount equals hours times bill rate.
5. Send the backup sheet with the invoice, not after it — Attach the labor backup sheet to the invoice. Add the change order log if any out-of-scope work is being billed. Offer the daily reports on request.

Step 4 is almost mechanical if step 2 was done properly. The line your foreman wrote in What They Worked On is the same line your customer reads in What Was Done. Collect it once and it does two jobs.

Bill Rate, Not Cost Rate

The most expensive mistake you can make with this document is sending the wrong version of it.

The labor backup sheet has a Bill Rate column, and that is deliberate. Most labor reports — including the one your job costing spreadsheet produces, and including the labor cost reports in most time tracking software — show a cost rate: what you pay the electrician, usually loaded with workers comp, taxes, and burden. That report is for you. Email it to a customer and you have just published your labor cost and your margin, and the next conversation is about your markup instead of the work.

Keep them separate on purpose. Internal reports carry cost rates and never leave the office. The labor backup sheet carries bill rates, matches the classifications in the signed work authorization, and is the only one the customer sees. If you want to see what a finished customer-facing packet looks like end to end, the sample billing packet is filled out with example data and annotated.

The Four Questions, and Which Form Answers Each

Almost every T&M billing argument is one of these four.

• “Three guys for two days? On what?” The labor backup sheet, one line per worker per day, with the work described specifically enough to picture.
• “Why am I paying for someone to drive to the supply house?” Section 5 of the work authorization, which lists travel, material runs, mileage, rental, and standby time as billable or not billable, signed before the work started.
• “I never approved that.” The change order log, with the date, the person who asked, and the drawing or contract line showing it was not in the base scope. Log the small ones too — four unlogged two-hour favors is a day of labor you gave away.
• “This is way more than you told me.” Section 7 of the work authorization: a good-faith estimate stated plainly as not a fixed price, plus the dollar figure at which you stop and get written approval to keep going. That threshold is the single most useful line in the form.

A Worked Example

Sample figures from the filled example rows in the kit — not a real customer, and not a claim about yours. Change the inputs to your rates.

A four-day tenant improvement, one foreman, one journeyman, one apprentice. Bill rates of $112, $95, and $62 per hour. 43.5 hours across the four days works out to $3,764.00 in labor, and every one of those hours has a sentence next to it naming the panel, the circuits, and the fixture count. The customer can add it up themselves.

Now picture the same $3,764.00 with nothing but a weekly hours total behind it. Nothing about the amount changed. What changed is whether it gets paid in thirty days or sits in a folder while somebody works up the nerve to call you.

Where Paper Usually Breaks First

All of this works on paper, and it will keep working. The part that breaks first is never the backup sheet — it is the daily note. Getting one written line out of every worker, every day, on every job, without chasing anyone, is the whole job. Six weeks in, the reports thin out, then the backup sheet has nothing to be built from, and you are reconstructing a month from memory.

If you want the crew side handled, that is what FieldTimesheet does: the note is captured at clock-out on the worker's phone, and the backup sheet prints from it. Same documents, nobody retyping. But the forms above are yours either way — they are the method, and the method is what actually settles invoices.

Related free tools: the construction timesheet template for collecting hours, job costing spreadsheet and crew cost dashboard for the internal cost side, and the T&M diagnostic if you want to work out where the hours are going before you change anything.