Every T&M call completed today should have an invoice by tomorrow. Every month you wait to bill is a month of cash float you are funding out of your own pocket.
T&M electrical work has three distinct cash flow leaks — billing timing, hour capture, and material markup. Most electrical contractors have all three. Each is fixable independently. Together they represent the difference between T&M work that produces 35–50% gross margin and T&M work that produces 18–22% — which is barely better than new construction without the billing complexity.
A T&M call completed on the 3rd gets invoiced on the 31st. That is 28 days of float you are funding. On $800,000 per year in T&M work, the average unbilled balance at any given time under monthly billing is $65,000. That money could be in your account today. It is sitting in unbilled work waiting for end of month.
A service tech drives 40 minutes to a call, spends 25 minutes diagnosing, drives back to the shop to get a part, returns and spends 90 minutes on the repair. Billable time: 3 hours 35 minutes. What goes on the invoice: 90 minutes of repair time. The drive and diagnostic hours are billable under most T&M agreements and are omitted on every call because nobody built a system to capture them.
Parts picked up at the supply house for a T&M call are billed at cost because it feels cleaner. On $200,000 per year in T&M material at a 20% markup, that decision costs $40,000 per year in margin. The markup is contractually appropriate, commercially standard, and almost universally accepted — it just needs to be in the T&M agreement before work starts.
Every completed T&M call — service, repair, installation, inspection — gets an invoice within 48 hours. Not at end of week. Not at end of month. Within 48 hours. The technician submits the time and material log at job completion. The invoice is generated from that log. The customer receives it the next business day. Cash arrives 15–30 days later instead of 45–75 days later.
Time capture covers four categories: travel time (portal to portal from the shop to the job), diagnostic time (time spent identifying the problem before any repair), repair time (the actual work), and parts run time (any additional travel to retrieve parts not on the truck). All four categories are billable under most T&M agreements. All four need to be captured at the call — not reconstructed from memory later.
In ControlQore, material costs on T&M calls carry a defined markup that applies automatically when the invoice is generated. No manual calculation. No decision at invoice time. The markup was defined in the T&M agreement. It applies every time. The customer sees the marked-up price on the invoice, which is the contractually agreed billing method.
T&M invoices are smaller and more frequent than new construction pay apps — which means they are easier to overlook in the AR aging. SPM tracks T&M AR separately and triggers a follow-up call at 15 days past due. On $800K in annual T&M billings with 30-day terms, a 15-day follow-up cycle keeps average days outstanding below 40 and eliminates the 90+ day T&M balances that show up in every electrical contractor's aging report.
This contractor did $800,000 per year in T&M service work billed monthly. Hour capture was averaging 70% of actual billable time — drive and diagnostic hours omitted systematically. Material was billed at cost. Monthly billing left an average $65,000 in unbilled work at any point in the month.
Total AR recovery at engagement start — including T&M invoices that had been sitting 60–90 days with no follow-up. The T&M billing system then went live with 48-hour invoicing, full hour capture, and material markup.
Same work. Same technicians. Same customer base. Different billing system — one that captured everything, applied markup, and invoiced immediately.
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