Time & Materials Billing for Trades: Labour Burden, Charge-Out Rates, Daywork Sheets & Capped Invoices

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn base wages into the full cost of employing each tradesperson: annual wages, percentage burden items, fixed costs per worker, the cost per paid hour and the burden rate of the whole crew.
• Find out how many hours each grade can really bill, spread the company overhead over those hours, add a profit markup and round the result into an hourly charge-out rate per grade.
• Turn a week of start and end times into decimal hours worked, survive a night call-out that ends after midnight, round every entry up to the quarter hour for billing and total the billed hours for one worker with SUMIFS.
• Price a week of billed hours: look up the rate for each grade, find the weekday with WEEKDAY, split weekday overtime from normal hours, apply Saturday and Sunday multipliers and see how much of the bill the premiums make up.
• Cost the materials used on the job, look up a markup that falls as the line cost rises, bill each line with its markup and check what the materials really earn as markup and as margin.
• Bill a day of small T&M jobs: labour with a one-hour minimum, travel by zone, hired equipment with its own minimum hire time and a call-out fee per visit, ending with the full price of one job.
• Turn a week of daywork lines into an invoice: totals per category with SUMIFS, billed to date against previous invoices, the amount you may bill under a not-to-exceed cap and the excess that needs a change order.
• Close the job: margin per category and in total, the effective labour rate per hour actually worked, what the margin would have been at the fixed price offered and a chart of cost versus billed per category.