Many subs have good crews and a thin back office. The invoice to the prime waits on a text thread and somebody's memory. When the crew's marks on the map become the tally, the office sees the priced tally instead of rebuilding the count by hand.
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From the marked map to the invoice to the prime
Coming in the explainer series. Until then, the mechanism is written out below.
A sub with two or three good crews often runs the office from a phone. The prime sends a work order and a map. What got done goes back as a text: addresses, footage, a handful of photos. The invoice comes a week or two later, built from that thread.
Then the prime's office checks it against the map and the work order. If the sub's numbers and the prime's numbers disagree, somebody calls somebody, and the invoice sits until it is sorted out.
The fix is not a better text thread. It is making the crew's record of the work the same thing the invoice is built from.
The crew places each rate code and quantity on the as-built, where the work was done. Every mark carries a code from your price book.
The crew submits the marked map from the site. Crews can only tap codes from your price book, and every code is checked again at Submit. A mark without a code cannot be submitted. The record shows what was placed and when it was submitted.
The tally is re-counted from the marks on the server. Footage and units add up by rate code from the marks, not from a count typed in later.
The tally is counted from the crew's marks and priced from your price book, ready for the invoice to the prime.
What the office stops doing: re-keying the crew's texts and sheets into an invoice, and recounting footage the map already shows.
Each job carries the PO number it bills against. The quantities in the tally are the ones the crew marked on the map, and you can download the marked-up map as a PDF to send with your invoice. When the prime's reviewer asks where a number came from, the answer is on the map.
Primes ask for a current COI, W9, and the certs the job requires before a sub's crew starts. Keep those current and check their dates. That side is covered in contractor compliance tracking.
No. The sub's office sends the prime the invoice, and the marked map as backup if the prime asks for it.
Go back to the marked map. The tally is counted from the marks, so each quantity in the tally points to marks the crew placed on the map where the work was done.
Yes. You send the invoice the way you do today, on the prime's terms. In TCS, the crew's marks become the tally, priced from your price book, ready for the invoice.
The field capture and the tally are map to invoice, and the office review step is field approval. Compliance documents are covered in contractor compliance tracking.
Would it be a bad idea to walk one job from the marked map to your invoice to the prime? Free 30-minute Fit Call.
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