An Unsigned T&M Ticket Is a Donation

What the Ticket Is Really For

Extra work happens on every job. A condition is different from the drawings, an owner asks for something on the spot, another trade's error has to be worked around. The work gets done, because stopping costs more than proceeding, and the question of who pays is deferred.

The T&M ticket is how that deferral stays recoverable. It records what was done, by whom, for how long, with what materials, on the day it happened — which is the only day anyone can accurately say those things.

Its function is evidentiary, and that should shape how it is filled in. The audience is not the accounts department. The audience is whoever eventually decides, possibly months later and possibly in a formal setting, whether this work was extra and what it was worth.

The Signature Is the Asset

A perfectly detailed unsigned ticket and a scrappy signed one are not close in value. The signed one is an acknowledgement by the other side; the unsigned one is an assertion by yours.

This is worth being clear about with the person signing, because a superintendent who believes signing means agreeing to pay will decline, and a contractor who lets them believe that loses the record. The usual and reasonable position is that the signature acknowledges the hours, materials and equipment as accurate, while entitlement and pricing remain open.

Print that distinction on the ticket. It removes the objection, it gets tickets signed, and it prevents a later argument in which one party says the signature meant approval and the other says it meant nothing at all.

What Belongs on It

The content that matters is the content a stranger would need to reconstruct the day. Names rather than headcounts, because a classification drives a rate. Actual hours rather than a rounded shift. Materials with quantities and, where possible, the delivery or purchase reference.

The field most often left blank is the one that does most of the work in a dispute: what directed the work. A ticket that references an RFI number, a written directive, a specific instruction from a named person, or a photographed field condition connects the extra work to a cause. A ticket that says only "additional work as directed" leaves the most contested question unanswered.

• →Project, location within the project, and date.
• →What directed the work — RFI number, directive, named instruction, or photographed condition.
• →Each worker by name and classification, with actual hours.
• →Materials by quantity, with a purchase or delivery reference where one exists.
• →Equipment used and for how long.
• →Photographs of the condition and the completed work.
• →Signature, printed name, role, and the date signed.
• →A clear statement of what the signature acknowledges.

Why Tickets Get Lost

The failure is almost never a refusal to sign. It is that the ticket is written on paper at the end of a long day, put on a truck dashboard, and arrives in the office a week later with a signature nobody can read and a description nobody can interpret.

By then the superintendent who signed it has moved to another project, the field condition has been covered up, and the only person who can explain the entry is a technician trying to remember one Tuesday among many.

Capturing the ticket digitally in the field solves a specific and narrow problem: it puts the record in the project file on the day it was created, with the photographs attached and the signature captured while the person is standing there. That is not a workflow improvement so much as the difference between a claim you can substantiate and one you cannot.