How to document a construction delay when you are the subcontractor

You were supposed to start overhead rough-in on the second floor on March 3. The deck pour slipped twice, the coordination drawings came back late, and you finally got the floor on April 14. Nobody wrote anything down, because everybody was busy.

Six weeks later your labor hours are 900 over budget and the GC’s project manager says, in a perfectly friendly way, that he never saw a delay notice from you.

That is the whole problem. A delay costs a sub money on the day it happens and becomes recoverable — or not — on paper that had to exist that same day. You cannot reconstruct it in June. This article is the operational half: what to record, when, and how it turns into a request for money. The legal half — what your subcontract entitles you to, and what your state’s law does with it — belongs to your attorney, and nothing here is legal advice.

What a delay actually costs a sub

GCs and owners argue delay in terms of the critical path and the completion date. A sub’s losses are more mundane and usually larger as a share of the contract:

• Idle and standby time. A six-man crew on site with nothing available to install. You pay eight hours; you install two.
• Remobilization. Demobilizing to another job and coming back — trucks, trailers, lifts, the half day each way nobody bills.
• Stacking and out-of-sequence work. Three months of float got absorbed upstream, so six weeks now hold what twelve used to. Four trades in one corridor is slower per hour for everyone in it.
• Extended duration. A twelve-week scope stretched across twenty-two still needs a foreman, a truck, a dumpster and a weekly coordination meeting for all twenty-two.
• Price escalation on unbought material. Copper, conduit, sheet metal and glass cost what they cost the day the PO goes out — a problem with its own paperwork.
• Overtime and winter work. The recovery schedule arrives with the weather.

Only the first and the last are intuitive. The middle three hold most of the money and are the hardest to prove without a record.

Why delay claims from subs fail

They fail for four reasons, and three are paperwork:

1. No contemporaneous record. A log written the day it happened is evidence. A memo written in June about March is an argument.
2. No notice, or notice too late. Many subcontracts set a window to put an impact in writing, sometimes only a handful of days. Miss it and, depending on the contract and the state, the merits may never get discussed.
3. No baseline. “We were slower than planned” means nothing without the plan: the crew sizes and durations you bid.
4. No separation of causes. If your own manpower was short in week 9, the GC will pin the entire overrun on that unless your record separates the two.

Everything below exists to kill those four.

The record you need, and it has to be daily

A log that says only “continued rough-in, 6 men, cloudy” is worthless in a dispute. The log that survives has six things in it. The foreman daily log template walks through every field; this is the delay-specific subset.

1. What you planned to do today. One line: “Second floor east corridor, overhead rough-in, 6 men.” Without it, nothing else on the page proves impact.

2. What actually happened, with a cause and an actor. Not “could not work,” but “second floor east deck not available — shoring still in place from the 4/12 pour. Directed by GC superintendent to relocate to first floor north.” A cause plus who said so.

3. Headcount and hours, split between productive and impacted. Six men, eight hours each: two on the original scope, six relocated or idle. That split is the claim. If hours land as one lump per day, you have the cost and not the reason.

4. Photos with dates. The closed corridor. The shoring still standing. The other trade in your ceiling. Three photos a day from a phone outvalue a page of prose six months later.

5. Weather, every day, whether it mattered or not. Its value is that you captured it before you knew which day you would need it. A log that records weather only on bad days looks exactly like what it is.

6. Who you told, and when. The superintendent’s name, the time, and what was said. This is the field half of the notice obligation, and routinely the only thing that dates when the GC knew.

Write all six the same day. A log submitted the next morning is still contemporaneous; one assembled from memory at month end is not.

Notice: the operational version

Read your own subcontract before you need to. The clause is in there, and it is usually short, specific about timing, and specific about who to send it to. Then build a habit around whatever it says:

• Put the impact in writing to the person named in the contract, not just the superintendent standing next to you. A verbal heads-up is not notice.
• Date it and describe the impact factually. What was unavailable, which crew, which day, what you did instead.
• Do not wait for a cost number. The notice is about the event. One sent inside the window saying you will quantify the cost when the impact ends beats a fully priced letter sent three weeks late.
• Send it even when the relationship is good. This is the one subs skip. Notice is not an accusation, and under many contracts skipping it can waive the claim outright.
• Keep sending it. A delay that runs eleven weeks is not one notice. Many contracts expect the impact to be updated as it continues.

What the notice entitles you to is a legal question that varies by contract and by state. Many commercial subcontracts limit or bar money for delay while still allowing a time extension, and how far that goes is contested in different jurisdictions. Get a lawyer to read yours once, for the whole company, and run the operational habit regardless of the answer — the same record supports a time extension, an acceleration cost, a stacking claim and a defense against the back charge that shows up at closeout.

Capture each cost the way it actually happens

The three big delay costs each need a different mechanism. Mixing them is how claims get discounted wholesale.

Cost	What proves it	Where it has to be captured
Idle / standby time	Daily log cause plus hours split productive vs. impacted	The field, the same day
Inefficiency from stacking or out-of-sequence work	Units installed per hour in the impacted period against your bid rate or your own earlier rate on the same job	Labor hours coded to the same cost code across both periods
Extended duration	The dated start and finish you planned against the dated start and finish you got, times your weekly cost to stay	Schedule plus payroll and equipment records

Inefficiency is the one people get wrong. You cannot argue it from a total overrun. You argue it by comparing the same crew on the same cost code in a clean period and an impacted one — 1,100 feet of conduit per 100 hours in February, 640 feet per 100 hours in May. That comparison only exists if your hours were coded consistently all along, which is the whole argument of tracking labor hours by job and cost code.

Turning the record into a request for money

Once the impact has a beginning and an end, it follows the path any extra follows:

1. Open a change event as soon as the impact starts, even with no price. It collects everything about this one cause, and its open date is the date you flagged it.
2. Price the hours as they happen, not at the end. The crew that stood by on 4/14 belongs on a ticket dated 4/14, priced off your agreed rate list and signed that day if the GC’s representative will sign it. A stack of signed tickets beats one twelve-week total.
3. Keep the signature question separate from the work question. If the GC directs you to proceed and will not sign yet, that is a different problem with its own answer — how to bill for extra work without a signed change order.
4. Roll the event into one change order when the impact is quantified — one number, with the log extract, the hour split and the photos behind it. Then it ages in the change order log like every other open number you are chasing, because an unpriced impact nobody tracks becomes a write-off at closeout. If the GC will not act, what to do when a GC is not paying covers the escalation.

A rhythm that costs about twenty minutes a week

• Daily, in the field. Six fields in the log. Hours split when the day was impacted. Three photos.
• Friday, in the office. Read the week’s logs. Any impacted day with no notice out — send it. Any open change event with unpriced hours — price them.
• Monthly, at billing. Compare hours by cost code against the bid, and chase a widening gap back to the impacted days before the number is three months old.

Where SubMark fits

None of this requires software. It requires the record to exist on the day — exactly the part that fails when it lives in a notebook in a truck. SubMark holds the pieces in one place:

• Daily logs with weather, a delay cause from a fixed list (weather, material, labor, access, GC direction, inspection, other), a narrative, labor, materials and photos, submitted by the foreman and reviewed in the office. The dated record becomes a by-product of the day rather than a task nobody owns.
• Time clock and labor logs that put hours on a job, per worker per day, and on a phase when phase tracking is on, so the clean-versus-impacted comparison starts from hours you already recorded instead of a reconstruction. Job costing shows labor at wage rate, so compare it to a wage-rate baseline — how to calculate a labor burden rate explains when each number is right.
• Change events and T&M tags — a change event per cause, kept internally, and beside it T&M tags (an opt-in module) priced in the office from your rate lists and e-signed by the GC on the spot or by link, with several signed tags bundled into one change order when the impact closes. T&M hours stay on the tag and do not post into job-costing actuals, so the standby hours you bill and the payroll hours you spent stay two numbers you can compare.
• Change order tracking with status and aging, so an impact noticed in April is still visible in September instead of quietly becoming a concession.
• Crew scheduling with a dated record of where each crew was assigned, to set against the hours they actually logged, which is the other half of the standby story.

SubMark does not write your notice letter and it does not decide what your contract owes you. It makes sure that when somebody finally asks what happened on April 14, the answer is a dated page with a photo on it.

One subscription covers your office, and the foremen writing the logs that carry all of this cost nothing — field users and the subs you invite are free and unlimited. See how pricing works.