Electrical contractor operations audit The extra got built. The T&M tag rode in the truck. We find where the money leaks.
Extras billed months late, pay apps that miss the cutoff, retainage parked behind closeout. In two weeks, from the records the shop already keeps, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For electrical contractors at $1M+ a year.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What electrical contractors say about the money they can’t find.
01
Extras built before they’re priced
The super asks the foreman, the crew runs it that day, and the tag waits for a signature. Turning it into a change order that week is nobody’s job.
02
Invoices out late, then chased
The bill waits for the end of the job. Once it goes out, following up on a schedule is nobody’s job, so collecting turns into scrambling.
03
A pay app that misses the cutoff
The percent complete, the new change-order lines and the lien waiver come from three people. When one is late, the pay app rolls a month while payroll runs weekly.
04
Retainage waiting on a binder
The last slice of the contract waits on as-builts, O&M manuals and the final lien waiver. Assembling them after the crew leaves is nobody’s job.
05
No way to tell which jobs paid
Hours get coded to general and material isn’t tied to job numbers, so service and project work share one P&L and fade shows up at closeout.
06
Estimates emailed and never followed up
Service estimates go out by email and wait for a reply. The second call is nobody’s job, and meanwhile the phone keeps ringing with new work.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- Call
- Hand-off 01 to Bid
- Hand-off 02 to Contract
- Hand-off 03 to Job
- Hand-off 04 to Pay app
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Margin
- Hand-off 02 · Bid → Contract
Service estimates emailed with no follow-up date, and bids with no recorded outcome.
- Hand-off 04 · Job → Pay app
Extras built on a verbal request, tagged late or never, and missing from the pay app.
- Hand-off 05 · Pay app → Paid
Pay apps past the GC’s cutoff, and retainage parked behind a closeout binder.
- Hand-off 06 · Paid → Margin
Hours coded to general, so fade shows up at closeout instead of mid-job.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
Of the T&M tags written last quarter, how many carry the super’s signature — and how many reached a pay app?
How many executed change orders are not yet a line on the schedule of values for their job?
How much retainage sits with GCs right now on jobs where the crew has already demobilized — and whose name is on each closeout binder?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 3 of 6 · Contract → Delivery
Choose the answer that sounds like your shop.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the shop’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
Extras the super asked for on site and the crew built that day — tagged late, never signed, or never tagged at all — and what each one settled for at closeout
Executed change orders that never became a line on the schedule of values, so no pay app ever carried them
Pay apps that missed a GC’s cutoff and rolled a full billing cycle while payroll kept running weekly
Retainage aging behind closeout documents — as-builts, O&M manuals, warranties, the final lien waiver — with no owner and no date
Panel, service and generator upgrades a tech flagged on a closed ticket that never became a written estimate
Labor hours coded to “shop/general” instead of the job and cost code, so fade shows up at closeout instead of mid-job
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions electrical contractors ask first.
We already run ServiceTitan or BuildOps, and the GC runs Procore. Doesn’t that catch unbilled extras?
Those systems record what gets entered. This leak lives in what never gets entered: the extra directed on site with no tag, the approved change order that never became an SOV line, the upgrade a tech noted on a ticket that nobody quoted. The Review reads the field system against the tag book, the pay apps and the books, and counts the gaps between them. Nothing gets switched off and nobody learns new software. If the records show the hand-off already holds, the report says so. It starts with the free 20-minute call.
Pushing paper on every extra will hurt the GC relationship. Why would we start now?
The Review doesn’t change how the shop deals with any GC; it counts what already happened. A tag the super signs the same afternoon is a smaller conversation than a disputed COR at closeout, argued after everyone’s memory of the hours has gone. What the subcontract requires before extra work starts — a signature, an email, a written directive — is a question for the shop’s construction attorney. We don’t give legal advice.
How do you put a dollar figure on an extra nobody billed?
From the shop’s own numbers: hours from timesheets and daily reports, material from supply-house invoices, and the shop’s own rates and markup, set against what the change order or the closeout settlement actually paid. Public data only shows scale. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median electrician wage at $30.38 an hour in May 2025. That is a wage, not a billing rate: in an illustrative two-person, four-hour extra it comes to about $243 of wages before burden, material, overhead or markup. In the report, the shop’s own burdened rate and pricing replace that example.
Retainage is the GC’s call. What does it have to do with an operations audit?
The subcontract sets the amount and the release terms, and some of those terms sit with the GC. The part the shop controls is the closeout binder: as-builts, O&M manuals, the final lien waiver. The Review lists every retainage dollar by job with its closeout status, so each binder gets a name and a date. What a given subcontract allows is a question for the shop’s construction attorney.
You’re not electricians. What do you know about our jobs?
We don’t touch the electrical work, the takeoff, the labor units or the code. We read the paper trail where money changes hands: tags, CORs, SOVs, pay apps, lien waivers, AR and job cost. A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution. There are no client case studies on this site yet, and we would rather say that than invent one.
Related reading
In depth
The long version, for an owner who wants the detail.
How retainage release works, by kind of work
When retainage comes back depends partly on things the shop controls — the closeout documents, the final lien waiver, the punch list sign-off — and can also depend on terms it does not, such as release tied to the GC’s own retainage or to completion of the whole project.
On federal work, FAR 52.232-5 lets the contracting officer retain at most 10 percent of a progress payment from the prime contractor when satisfactory progress has not been made, and FAR 52.232-27(d)(1) lets the prime and the sub negotiate a subcontract term that retains a specified percentage of each progress payment. On state and private work, state statutes may limit how much can be withheld and how quickly a released payment has to reach the sub.
Where an electrical contractor’s money slows down
Each step passes the work to a different person or system. The Review counts what slips at each one.
Bid to award: the follow-up on quotes still open
Award to schedule of values: what the contract actually covers
Field direction to T&M tag: the extra work the super asked for
T&M tag to signed change order, before the next pay application
Pay application to payment, and retainage after substantial completion
Service calls: completed work to invoice
A check on the last job that closed out
Take the last commercial job that closed out and lay three things side by side: every T&M tag or extra the foreman remembers (the tag book, truck photos, the daily reports, or a short conversation with the foreman), the COR log or the change-order emails, and the final schedule of values, the last G702/G703 and the final invoice.
For each extra, mark five things: tagged, signed by the super, COR sent (with the date), change order executed, and the pay app that billed it. A blank between “tagged” and “on a pay app” is labor in payroll with no billing on record, unless the extra was folded into a combined change order or the closeout settlement; if it was, note which one next to it. An empty first column means nothing records extras when they happen, and that is the finding.
Starting the fix costs nothing: the tag books already in the trucks, one rule — no extra starts without a tag the super signs that day — and one weekly log of tag number, job, date, hours, material, COR date, CO date and pay app number. A tag with no pay app number after 30 days goes on the next week’s call list. Row 03 of the free Friday Ledger counts the same thing each week: work done beyond the original scope, and how much of it was in writing. What counts as written approval under a given subcontract is a question for the shop’s construction attorney.
Where automation and AI can help once the leak is measured
Tools come after the numbers, and only where a leak justifies them. A person still decides every price and every message.
A T&M tag that cannot close without a signed change-order request attached
A weekly match of field tags against change orders and the next pay application
A bid log with a follow-up date and a recorded outcome on every quote
AI-assisted reading of foreman notes and photos into a draft change-order description, priced and approved by the project manager
The numbers that show whether the fixes hold
We do not promise a result. These are the measures the findings are written in, so the shop can track them after the Review.
T&M tags converted to signed change orders, and the days each took
Change orders billed on the next pay application
Bid follow-up rate and hit rate, by estimator
Retainage outstanding past substantial completion
Days from pay-application submission to payment
Sources
Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022: firms, employment and receipts by enterprise receipts size, 6-digit NAICS · U.S. Census Bureau, 2025
Occupational Outlook Handbook: Electricians · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026
FAR 52.232-5, Payments under Fixed-Price Construction Contracts · Acquisition.gov, 2026
FAR 52.232-27, Prompt Payment for Construction Contracts · Acquisition.gov, 2026
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.