2026, July 3rd – Time and Material Workflow

July 3rd, 2026
Hosted by: Taha, Trainer at Contractor Foreman
Topic: Time and Material Workflow — When to Use It, How to Bill It, and Why Documentation Is Everything

Webinar Description

In this advanced training session, Taha walks through the Time and Material workflow in Contractor Foreman — what it is, when it makes sense to use it, and how to manage it correctly so that every dollar you spend actually makes it onto an invoice. Drawing on eight years as an engineer and construction project manager, he frames T&M not as a lesser alternative to fixed-cost work, but as the right tool for a specific set of jobs.

The session opens with a comparison of the three most common contract models. In a fixed-cost contract, the contractor carries the risk: come in under estimate and you profit, go over and the loss is yours. In Cost Plus, that risk transfers to the client and your profit is a fixed service fee agreed upfront. In Time and Material, the risk also transfers to the client — but profitability comes from two different levers: the markup applied to materials and the labor rate you charge. Taha is candid that T&M typically produces lower margins than fixed-cost work, and that the tradeoff is worth understanding before committing to it on a job.

Where T&M genuinely shines, Taha explains, is when the scope simply cannot be determined upfront. He shares an example from a townhouse complex where every attic requiring repair had a different layout and different deficiencies — some needed insulation, some needed framing rebuilt, and no two were alike. Producing an accurate fixed-cost estimate was impossible, so the work was agreed as T&M with a ceiling per attic and a pause-and-reassess trigger if that limit was reached. Service work, emergency repairs, and maintenance fall into the same category: jobs where the time spent producing a detailed estimate would cost more than the estimate is worth.

The session’s central theme is documentation. Taha is emphatic that T&M demands a higher standard of paperwork than any other contract structure, because your client is paying actual costs and will not approve a bill they cannot verify. A material invoice with no backup does not get paid. This shapes every step of the workflow that follows — from how the estimate is built to how invoices are assembled and sent.

On the estimate itself, Taha recommends providing a good faith estimate with a full breakdown rather than a single lump-sum line item. Clients are more comfortable seeing where the money is expected to go, and the total doubles as a soft ceiling that triggers a reassessment conversation when approached. Two things must be defined explicitly in the estimate — in the line items, the notes, or the terms — before any work begins: your labor rates by trade or role, and your material markup percentage. Without those defined and signed off, clients will push back later on what your foreman or carpenter costs per hour, and there is no documented agreement to point to.

From there the session covers the modules that carry the workflow — purchase orders, subcontracts, bills, expenses, and timecards, the same tools used on fixed-cost projects — and how each cost flows through to the invoice. Taha then walks through the Job Cost Actual Report, reframing how to read it under a T&M contract: profitability figures matter far less here, because the number that matters is whether total invoiced amounts match total actual costs on every cost code line. If actual costs are climbing and invoicing is lagging behind, that gap is money you have spent and not yet billed — and on a T&M job, that is the single biggest risk you face.

The Q&A produced a practical point worth highlighting: even on T&M and Cost Plus jobs where costs pass straight through, change orders are still worth creating. Taha’s reasoning is protective rather than financial — a signed change order formally documents that the client authorized additional scope, which prevents a handshake agreement from becoming a dispute later. He also demonstrated live how to generate a purchase order directly from a change order so that bills can be tracked against it, since bills cannot be applied to a change order directly.

Attendees were offered a complimentary one-on-one training session to go deeper on T&M setup, billing workflows, or any other module covered in the session.

This session is ideal for:

• Contractors who take on service work, emergency repairs, or maintenance jobs where scope cannot be pinned down in advance
• Teams already running T&M work but struggling to keep invoicing current with actual costs incurred
• Anyone who has had a client dispute labor rates or material markup after the fact because it was never documented in the estimate
• Project managers who want to understand how T&M compares to fixed-cost and Cost Plus before deciding which structure fits a given job