Ask any erector running multiple commercial sites where their labor hours go, and the honest answer is: they are not sure.
Time and driving time both end up on whichever job was last active. 60% of contractors estimate they are wasting more than 11% of field labor costs and, for erectors, the multisite workday is where most of that waste lives.
Field labor is the largest controllable variable in an erector’s budget. Fabrication and erection account for 70% or more of a steel building’s frame cost. Fabrication is a contracted fixed cost; erection labor is what erectors actually control and the number that moves margins.
When crews work across more than one site
For an erector running several projects, the question is how reliably the records follow each crew. Managing several sites in a week and moving workers between sites during a day are different situations. The time record needs to reflect what actually happened.
If workers have to change job codes manually, a missed change can leave time against the previous project. The total hours may be right while the split between jobs is wrong. That is the problem worth checking in your own records.
One contractor I spoke with described it like this: hours end up on the wrong job, the office calls workers to figure out where they went, and payroll closes before anyone has a real answer.
What wrong clock-ins actually cost
When a worker clocks into the wrong job, the cost does not disappear. It just lands somewhere it does not belong. On fixed-price work, that corrupts labor actuals and distorts the next bid. On time-and-material work, it means hours that cannot be invoiced.
As an illustration, five workers with one hour each charged to the wrong job every week would leave 260 hours misallocated over 52 weeks. At an assumed labor cost of $40 an hour, that’s $10,400 sitting against the wrong jobs. The wages may still be correct. The job costs are not.
A commercial steel decking subcontractor managing crews across 25 to 40 projects nationwide ran the same exercise. Their time and attendance manager put it plainly: “If every person was off by an average of 30 minutes a day, every day, all week long, it came pretty close to $47,000 in payroll loss a week. That’s just for 30 minutes.”
The bidding consequence is quieter but compounds just as fast. If a job closes with corrupted actuals, the next bid for similar work is built on bad data. Most erectors connect that pattern far too late.
The travel time black hole
Driving time between sites either gets billed to whichever job was last active, or it disappears entirely. One demolition contractor told me that travel time “was almost certainly going to whatever job was already open.”
Consider a typical day: drive to the yard, work the first site, then drive to a second location after lunch. Each leg is a distinct cost.
The first thing most erectors try to combat this problem is geofencing, but it breaks down at the pace they move. Each job needs its own configured fence, and maintaining that across a rotating list of active and completed jobs creates overhead before the misattribution problem even starts.
The failure modes show up the same way every time. A crew driving past a finished site triggers that geofence before reaching the next one. Overlapping fences on adjacent sites create attribution conflicts. The system cannot distinguish between a crew that just arrived and the one that simply drove by.
What accurate multisite tracking looks like
The starting point is clear rules about where hours belong, backed by technology that makes those rules easier to follow. GPS-based time tracking can capture visits to job sites and driving activity as the day happens, then assign the time using the company’s settings.
Some entries still need a person to check the job or cost code. Make that review part of the day while the crew’s movements are fresh, and resolve discrepancies before payroll approval. The aim is to reduce the foreman’s paperwork, not give them another version of the same timecard to fill out.
One interior-finishing contractor described a report that separated 27 hours of project time from one hour and 45 minutes of driving. It is a useful example from another trade of making travel time visible alongside the work on site.
The bidding advantage
Contractors who fix multisite tracking build an actuals database their competitors do not have. Every closed job becomes a reference point for the next estimate, with labor hours by site type and crew size verified rather than guessed.
FMI’s “2023 Labor productivity study” found that a 6% to 10% labor productivity improvement translates to a 2% to 3% bottom-line gain and, with average operating margins of 4%, that is a 50% to 75% improvement in profitability. The gap between contractors who know their per-job labor costs and those who are estimating is that wide.
A five-question audit for your time records
Pull one week of time records and answer these questions:
- Which hours had no job code, and was that intentional?
- Was travel between jobs recorded and allocated according to your policy?
- On days workers changed sites, did the time records show the change?
- Which entries had to be corrected, and what caused the error?
- Were questions resolved while the day was still fresh and before payroll approval?
If those checks reveal gaps, trace the affected entries before relying on the job totals. A week of records gives you a place to start and shows which part of the process needs attention.
Bill Kapaldo, president of Construction Punch Services, a commercial repair and restoration contractor, described the estimating benefit in Workyard’s published case study. Before tracking the work more closely, his company had been “definitely underestimating time” but they “didn’t have the data to prove otherwise.” He concluded that “If I can’t predict how long it takes us to do something, we’re doomed to fail.”
The erectors who solved their labor tracking problems did not add administrative work in the field. Instead, they switched to a system that captures the information automatically. The work is already being done. The question is whether the records show where.
References
- FMI Corp., “Labor productivity study,” September 2023.
- FMI Corp., “Labor productivity study, Part 2: Prefabrication,” May 2024.
- FMI Corp., “Labor productivity study: Prefabrication summary,” Walls & Ceilings, 2024.
- American Institute of Steel Construction, “Economics: industry statistics and market conditions.”
- Workyard, “Construction Punch Services case study.”
Nic De Bonis is co-founder and CEO of Workyard, the Construction Operations Platform for specialty contractors and self-performing general contractors. He writes about the intersection of construction, technology, and operations, with a focus on how contractors can build more productive teams, run more profitable jobs, and grow without losing control of their business.
