Labour on a post-frame build is most of the risk and the last number most builders see. This is it, live on the job inside the Labor & costs card — whose closed tags already show labour against the estimate, what's been spent and the margin: hours from the crew's own field links, day rates from the tier each person sits on, and the surplus split by share of hours. For post-frame and barndominium builders only, so the labour is figured the way pole-barn crews are actually paid. The same arithmetic runs in Settings → Pay structure as a sandbox, so you can rehearse a job before you price it.
Also called: log hours · labour cost · job P&L · approve timesheets · expenses on a job
The closed card says how labour is tracking
Closed, the Labor & costs card still shows labour against what the estimate figured, what's been spent so far and the margin as tags — the labour tag turns red once it passes the estimate. If nothing has been logged yet it says so, beside the labour budget. Open it only when the numbers say to.
Labour overran the estimate for a fortnight and nobody opened the panel that would have said so.
The project manager glancing down a dozen jobs sees the one where labour has passed the estimate in red. Putting the number on the closed card means the overrun gets noticed on a Tuesday, not at payroll.
What a day costs
A tier is a rate with a name on it. Put somebody on a tier once, in Settings → Team, and every job they touch prices itself — no rate typed twice, and no job quoted off last year's numbers.
Rates live in somebody's head, so the same man is quoted at three different numbers across three jobs.
The office stops quoting the same man at three different rates. A tier is a rate with a name on it; naming it once stops the rate being renegotiated, silently, every time a job is priced.
What a job costs at these rates
The crew day, multiplied out, before you quote it. This is the labour figure that goes into the estimate — not a guess and not a round number.
Labour gets quoted as a round number that feels about right, and the job finds out later whether it was.
The owner commits to a labour number before anyone picks up a hammer. The pool is fixed by the days you figure for, not the days it takes — so this is the number the job has to beat.
Run the numbers on the job
Try itDays figured, how it actually finished, days on site, the crew day, the total pool and the surplus to share — then every worker with their hours, their days, what they earned and what they are owed. Move finished by a day and watch the surplus move with it.
Working out a pooled day-rate payout by hand — per person, per job, against the days it was figured for — is an evening's work, so it gets done once a quarter or never.
The owner can test a crew size before promising a price. It is a rehearsal, not a record — nothing is saved — so you can put a five-man crew against a seven-day job and see what finishing two days early is worth.
The surplus is split by hours, not evenly
This is the part nobody expects and the part that changes behaviour. Day rates are earned per day worked; the surplus is divided by share of the crew's hours. The man who was there every day takes more of it than the man who came in on Wednesday — so being there is what moves it.
An evenly split bonus pays the man who missed half the week the same as the man who never missed a morning, and the crew works that out within one job.
The man who never missed a morning sees that it paid. Splitting on share of hours points the incentive at attendance — the thing that actually finishes a build early — and it survives being explained to the crew on a Friday.
What each man takes home
Day rates earned, plus their share of the surplus, stacked so the second is visible as its own thing. It is the number the crew cares about and the number you will be asked for on Friday.
Payday turns into a negotiation because nobody can show how the figure was arrived at.
Each man sees what he earned by turning up and what he earned by finishing. Stacking the two separately is what makes the pay model believable, and a crew that believes it works for the surplus.
Where the hours actually went
Day by day, per person. A short bar is an afternoon somebody lost, and it is usually the afternoon the concrete did not turn up — which is also a delay worth logging.
A build runs two days long and nobody can say which days went missing, or whose.
The project manager can see the lost afternoon without asking anyone. A short bar per man per day is usually the first evidence that a delivery or an inspection — not the crew — cost the job its days.
The hours come from the crew, not from you
Every hour on this panel was clocked by the person who worked it, on their own field link — one tap in, one tap out. Nobody in the office retypes a timesheet, so nobody in the office can get one wrong.
Paper timesheets reach the office a week late and get typed in by someone who wasn't there, with transcription errors nobody catches until payday.
Nobody in the office retypes a timesheet, so nobody in the office gets one wrong. The person who worked the hour is the only one who records it, so the field and the office never hold two versions.
On the job, not in a spreadsheet
The payout sits inside the project's Labor & costs card, next to the hours and the stage costs — pool, day rates earned, fuel and equipment, surplus shared, and the table of who is owed what.
Crew pay gets worked out in a spreadsheet nobody opens next to the job it belongs to, so the money and the work drift apart within a season.
The owner reads pay in the same place as the stages that produced it. Hours, delays and money stay one record instead of two systems somebody has to reconcile.
Set the tiers once, in Settings
Under Team → Crews you create the pay tiers and name them whatever your business calls them. Under the crew, you assign each member a tier. From then on their rate follows them onto every job.
Every new job starts with somebody asking what each man is on, and the answer comes from memory.
The crew and the office point at the same named rate. Naming tiers in your own words — lead, journeyman, labourer — means a rate follows a man onto every job without anyone asking what he's on.
Rehearse it before you price it
The same calculator runs in Settings as a sandbox with nothing saved. Try a five-day crew of three against a seven-day crew of four and see which one you would rather quote.
You find out a crew size was the wrong call after the job is finished and the pool has already been paid out.
The owner gets to argue with the numbers before a customer sees a price. Nothing is saved, so you can push a scenario to the shape you would refuse before it is ever quoted.
Budget against what each phase is costing, labour included
Try itPer-phase budgets live in the job's Budget & margin card, in four buckets — materials, labour, subs and other. Labour counts the hours logged at what each person is actually paid; materials count from purchase orders, committed when sent and actual when delivered. Each phase shows budget, committed, actual and projected, so an overrun shows up while the phase is still running. The cost columns show only to people allowed to see pay.
Labour and materials were tracked in different places, so a phase could run over on both and look fine in each.
The owner sees which phase is eating the money while there is still a phase left to save. Labour and materials sit against the same budget line, so a concrete overrun can't hide in the crew's hours.
…and across every crew
Which crews finish inside their figured days and which do not. Over a season this is the difference between a rate you guessed and a rate you know.
One crew has been quietly running past its figured days all season and it never shows up as anything except thinner margins.
The owner learns which crews finish inside their figured days and which don't. Next season's figured days come from what your crews actually did rather than from what you assumed when you set the rate.
- 1Open the job's Labor & costs card — closed, it already shows labour against the estimate and what's been spent.
- 2Assign each stage to your crew or to a sub.
- 3Hours and expenses arrive against that stage from the field.
- 4Approve or reject each entry.
- 5Approved hours become cost against the job.
- 6Read revenue, estimated against actual, and margin.
A day-rate crew is simple to run and hard to account for. The pool is what the job was priced for, the day rates are what the crew earned by turning up, and the gap is the only part that rewards finishing early — but working that out by hand, per person, per job, is an evening's work nobody does. So it is worked out continuously, from numbers the crew already entered by clocking in.
- Labour costs unknown until after the job
- Double entry between the field and the office
- No stage-level cost attribution
