T&M tickets
T&M tickets priced by the office and signed on the spot.
The T&M ticket is the most expensive piece of paper on a commercial job, and on most jobs it is a carbon pad in a truck. Two hands spend six hours moving somebody else’s conduit, the superintendent nods, and the ticket either gets signed and billed or it gets lost in a glovebox and eaten. SubMark prices the ticket where the rates live and signs it where the work happened.
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- Labor rows carry the worker, the hours and the pay type; material and other rows carry their own cost.
- Signed in person on the pad, or by a link you send the superintendent.
- Several signed tickets convert into one change order instead of thirty arguments.
Why T&M on paper leaks money.
The signature happens before the price
A paper ticket gets signed for hours and quantities, not dollars. So you collect a signature that proves two men were there for six hours, and still have to argue three weeks later about what six hours of a journeyman and a helper plus 140 feet of pipe is worth. The signature you have is not the signature you needed.
Nobody in the office knows the ticket exists
The pad is in the truck. The office finds out on Friday, or at month end, or never. Every day between the work and the ticket reaching a desk is a day the GC’s memory gets worse and your claim gets weaker.
Rates are retyped from memory
Whoever writes the ticket uses the rate they think applies. Half the time it is last year’s rate, or the straight-time rate on an overtime call-out, or it is missing the markup entirely. Each of those is a small permanent loss, and there are dozens a year.
Thirty tickets become thirty conversations
A GC’s PM will not process thirty-one separate T&M tickets. He will ask you to roll them up, which means somebody rebuilds them in a spreadsheet, and any ticket that cannot be found in the pile is a ticket you do not bill.
How a T&M ticket runs in SubMark.
The office owns the pricing, the field owns the signature, and the two never retype each other’s work.
- 01 Open the ticket on the job
Title, description and the work date. The ticket belongs to a job from the first field, so it cannot end up as a loose piece of paper nobody can place.
- 02 Build the lines
Add labor, material and other rows. A labor row takes the worker, the hours, the pay type and the rate; material and other rows take a quantity, a unit and a unit rate. Markup and tax sit on the ticket as a whole.
- 03 Get it signed
Sign in person on the pad — name, title, signature — or send a signature link to the superintendent who gave the direction. Priced, then signed, in that order.
- 04 Fix what needs fixing
While a ticket is unsigned you can pull it back to draft and reprice it. Once it is converted to a change order, pricing is closed, so the number on a billed ticket cannot quietly change afterwards.
- 05 Roll them into one change order
Pick the signed tickets that belong together and convert them into a single change order. The GC gets one request with the signed tickets behind it, which is the form he will actually process.
Everything above ships today and none of it is a tier you upgrade into. The core modules are on in every trade pack from setup; a few extras, like the invoices inbox, are a switch in Settings. The full list is on the product page.
In the app
What a T&M ticket carries, line by line.
Three row types, because that is what extra work is made of, and each one asks for exactly what it needs:
- Labor row
- The worker, hours, the pay type (straight time, overtime and the rest) and the rate. Hours total up by pay type on the ticket.
- Material row
- Description, quantity, unit and unit rate. 140 LF of 3/4" EMT at your own price, not a guess.
- Other row
- Equipment, a rental, a delivery, a dumpster — the costs that are neither a man nor a material.
- Markup and tax
- Set on the ticket, applied to the lines. One place to change, so a ticket is never billed at cost by accident.
- Signature block
- Signed-by name, title and the signature itself, captured on the pad or through the share link.
- Back to draft
- An unsigned ticket that is out for signature can be pulled back and repriced. A converted one cannot.
- Signed, not sent
- Its own state, because the real thing happens in a stairwell with no service: the tag is signed and valid and has not reached the office yet. That is worth seeing in the log rather than pretending it is simply “signed”.
A ticket moves from draft through awaiting signature to signed (or signed-not-sent), then converted — or rejected, sent back for revision, or voided. The status column shows which signed tickets have not yet been converted to a change order, which is the only list that matters at month end.
Straight answer
What it does not do.
A product page that only lists wins is a product page you stop trusting in week two. These are the gaps, in our own words, before you find them yourself.
- T&M hours do not feed job-costing actuals. A T&M ticket is billing, not cost. Your cost comes from the daily labor logs and from the bills that pull in from QuickBooks, so the same hour is never counted twice.
- It does not price itself. The rate lists are yours — SubMark does not ship a rate book, and your trade pack pre-loads the worker types but never the rates.
- It does not chase the signature for you. You can send the link; a superintendent who will not sign is still a phone call.
Which trades feel this most.
Same problem, different shape. Each trade page leads with that trade's own phases, schedule of values and wording.
Electrical
Troubleshooting, temp power and somebody else’s mistake: the trade that runs the most T&M on a commercial job.
Plumbing
Unknown conditions under slab and in existing walls, billed by the hour because nobody could have bid it.
HVAC / Mechanical
Start-up, warranty calls and service work that never belonged to the base contract.
Questions
T&M tickets: what a sub’s office actually asks.
Who writes the ticket?
The office prices it off your own rate lists and markup; a superintendent or PM signs it off on site or sends a signature link. Foremen do not create tickets by default — an admin can grant it per role. The editor is single-column for a phone, with a signature pad sized for a thumb.
What if the superintendent will not sign on the spot?
Send him a signature link. The ticket stays in awaiting-signature until somebody signs, and you can pull it back to draft and reprice it in the meantime. What you cannot do is make the signature appear, and no software can.
Why don’t T&M hours count as cost?
Because a T&M tag is the billing side, not the cost side. Your labor cost comes from the daily labor logs and from bills that pull in from QuickBooks. Count the same hour twice and every job with extra work on it looks unprofitable.
Can I bill several tickets as one change order?
Yes — that is the normal path. Pick the signed tickets that belong to the same issue and convert them into one change order, with the tickets behind it as backup. A GC’s PM will process one request with twelve tickets attached; he will not process twelve requests.
Can a ticket be repriced after it is signed?
An unsigned ticket, yes — pull it back to draft. Once a ticket is converted to a change order, pricing is closed, so the number you billed is the number that stays on the record.
Read next
How to price a T&M ticket
Rates, markup, what to include, and the lines subs routinely forget to bill.
T&M tickets: getting signed, and getting paid
Who should sign, when to ask, and what to do when the super walks away.
Billing extra work without a signed change order
The ticket is signed and the change order is not. Here is the path.
Price the next ticket before it gets signed.
Start the trial, add your labor rates, and write one real T&M ticket. It takes about five minutes, and the signature comes back against a dollar figure for the first time.
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The rest of the job
Change orders
From the day the field finds the change to the day it is in the schedule of values, with an audit trail at every step.
Schedule of values
One SOV per job, built from your trade’s own breakdown, locked when the first draw goes out, and approved change orders added to it automatically.
Draw tracking
Fifteen jobs, nine GCs, nine cutoff dates and nine submission methods — in one calendar and one log, with drawn, certified and received as three different numbers.
Retainage tracking
Five or ten percent of everything you have ever billed, sitting somewhere, on jobs some of which finished last year.
Daily logs
The record that wins an argument nine months later, written in two minutes by a foreman who wants to go home.
Lien waiver tracking
Which waivers went up the chain, which the GC has received, and which draw is sitting still because one of them has not.
Job costing
The overrun you can still do something about, instead of the one you find in the end-of-job autopsy.
Crew scheduling
Who is on which job on Monday, across every job — and a flag the moment the same crew is promised to two of them.
QuickBooks
Bills and card purchases pull back as job costs. Draws and POs push across with a click. Your books stay your books.
Time tracking
Hours per worker, per job, per day — signed by the worker who worked them, approved by the office, and read straight into job costing.
Safety records
Toolbox talks signed off per person, scored site inspections, and certification and COI expiries you see 30 days out instead of on the day.