T&M tickets in commercial construction: getting signed, and getting paid

A T&M ticket is the cheapest piece of paper on the job and the most expensive one to get wrong.

The crew does four hours of work nobody budgeted. A superintendent pointed at something, said handle it, and your foreman handled it — which is the right call, because the alternative is standing around waiting for an RFI. Whether you get paid for those four hours comes down to what got written down, and who signed it, before the crew left the site.

Most of the time it does not get written down well. Here is how to run tickets so they hold up.

What a T&M ticket is for, and what it is not

A time-and-material ticket is evidence of work performed outside your contracted scope, captured the day it happened.

That is all it is. It is not a change order. It does not obligate anyone to pay you. It is the raw material a change order gets built from, and it has exactly one job: to make the facts of that afternoon undeniable three months later, when the person who directed the work has rotated off the project and the only thing left is paper.

That distinction decides everything downstream. Subs who treat the ticket as a bill get frustrated when nobody pays it. Subs who treat it as evidence collect the evidence properly, then go get a change order with it.

What belongs on the ticket

The five things that survive a dispute

1. Date, job, and the specific location. Not “3rd floor.” Room number, grid line, unit number — whatever your drawings call it. A location you can point to on a sheet is a location nobody argues about.
2. Who directed the work, by name. This is the most-skipped field on every T&M pad in the industry, and it is the one that wins arguments. “The super told us to” is not a name. “J. Alvarez, 2:15 PM” is.
3. Labor by worker and hours, at the classification actually used. If you sent a journeyman because that is who was on site, bill a journeyman. If you sent two apprentices, say so. Classifications that drift upward on tickets are the fastest way to lose credibility on all of them.
4. Material and equipment used, with quantities. Including the equipment that was already on site. A lift that sat on your extra work for three hours is a cost.
5. A short, plain description of why this was extra. One or two sentences. Not “per direction” — the actual reason: the embeds were in the wrong place, the wall was already closed, the submittal changed after you had roughed in.

Photos, and why one beats a paragraph

Take two: before and after, framed wide enough to prove where you are standing. A tight shot of a conduit tells nobody anything. The same conduit with a column line and a door opening in frame locates itself.

Photos also age better than descriptions. A year from now, your narrative is a claim and the photograph is a fact.

The signature, and what it actually means

Here is the part worth being straight about: a superintendent’s signature on a T&M ticket usually acknowledges that the hours and materials are accurate. It does not, on its own, mean the GC has agreed you are owed the money. Entitlement is a contract question and it gets settled in the change order.

Put that on the ticket in plain language — that the signature confirms the work and the hours, not the entitlement. It sounds like you are weakening your own document. You are not. You are making it signable. Superintendents hesitate over tickets that read like admissions of liability, and a ticket nobody will sign is worth nothing. Say what the signature means and most supers will sign it the same afternoon.

Get it signed before the crew leaves

A ticket signed that afternoon is a fact. A ticket emailed on Thursday is a negotiation.

By Thursday the super has had three other problems, is not certain it was four hours, and has a reason to push back. Nobody is being dishonest. It is just that memory is a terrible records system and everybody’s memory favors their own budget.

The delay is almost never stubbornness. It is logistics: the ticket is a carbon pad in a truck, the foreman is on another job by 4:00, and the pad gets to the office Thursday. Your process is not failing — your paper is.

What changes when the foreman can fill the ticket out, price it, and collect a signature on a phone while standing next to the work is simply that it happens. Same day, every day, because it takes two minutes instead of a trip to the office.

Pricing the ticket so the number holds up

Burdened labor, not base wage

A ticket priced at base wage is a ticket you lose money on. Burden, payroll taxes, insurance and comp are real costs on every hour your crew works, and they do not disappear because the hour was unplanned. Price off a burdened rate.

Rate lists agreed up front

The best time to agree your T&M rates is at contract execution. The worst time is after the first ticket, when the number is attached to a specific argument.

Get a rate schedule into the contract — hourly by classification, material markup, equipment rates. Then field pricing stops being arithmetic and becomes lookup. When the rates are already agreed, the ticket your foreman hands over is not a proposal. It is a calculation off a document the GC signed.

Markup, equipment and O&P

What is customary varies by region and by trade, and the honest answer is always whatever the contract says. Which is the point of the previous paragraph: if the contract does not say, you will be negotiating markup on every ticket for the length of the job.

From a stack of tickets to one change order

The failure mode is not losing tickets. It is this: forty signed tickets sitting in a folder, properly filled out, nobody bundles them, the job closes out, and the folder goes into storage.

Two things prevent it.

Bundle by cause, not by date. Every ticket that traces back to the same directive, the same RFI, the same late design change becomes one change order. A CO that says here is the one thing that happened and here are the seventeen tickets it caused is a CO a GC can evaluate and approve. Forty individual CORs is a CO log nobody will work through.

Submit while the people are still there. Submit while the superintendent who signed those tickets is still on the job and still remembers the conversation. Entitlement arguments get harder every month, and they get dramatically harder the day that super moves to the next project.

When the CO is approved, it needs to land on your schedule of values in the same week — otherwise you have won the argument and still not billed the money.

The spreadsheet version, and where it breaks

Three ordinary failures:

1. The ticket log is a tab in a workbook and one person in the office can read it.
2. Signed tickets exist as photos in somebody’s text messages. They are real, they are legible, and they are not anywhere you can produce them from.
3. Nobody can answer “how much unbilled T&M is sitting on job 214 right now.” Not quickly, not without an hour of digging. Which means the number is never in the room when it matters.

Your GC uses Procore. You use a spreadsheet. There’s a better way. Procore is where the GC’s record lives, and it is good at that — but your T&M exposure is not in it, and it never will be. Your unbilled extra work is your problem to track.

How SubMark handles it

SubMark runs this end to end, from the field:

• T&M Tags — field tickets priced off your own rate lists, signed by the GC on the spot with e-signature, then bundled into one change order.
• Change Events — crews log scope changes with photos and responsible trades the day they happen, convertible to a formal CO in one click.
• Daily Logs — weather, narrative, labor, materials and photos, with a submit-and-review workflow. The corroborating record behind every ticket.
• Change Order Tracking — build the COR, send the GC a link to review it, take their redlines and decision in place. Status, aging and recovery tracked against contract value.
• Job Costing — labor and material actuals against budget per job, so once the CO is approved you can see what the extra work actually cost while the job is still running.
• Email intelligence on Outlook and Gmail, so a GC’s reply on your change order shows up on your Home page with a link back to the thread, instead of sitting buried in an inbox.

The T&M ticket page walks the whole path — the three row types a ticket is built from, the signature states, and the point at which pricing closes — and the change order page picks it up from the rollup.

Field users are free and unlimited, which matters here more than anywhere — the whole process depends on foremen actually using it. See how pricing works.

A ticket process your foremen will follow

1. Agree the rates at contract execution. Classifications, markup, equipment. Before anyone needs them.
2. Write the ticket the same day. Not the same week.
3. Name who directed the work. A person, with a time.
4. Photograph it. Before and after, wide enough to locate.
5. Get the signature before the crew leaves the site.

Then one habit in the office: review open tickets once a week, bundle anything that has gone quiet, and submit the CO. Five field steps and one office hour. That is the whole system, and it is the difference between extra work being revenue and extra work being a folder.