A crew pay model for builders who pay by the hour but want the crew to have a stake in finishing early. A job is figured for a number of days, and its labour budget is what the planned crew would cost for those days. Everyone is paid every hour they work at their own rate. Finish inside the budget and the surplus is split by hours × each person's surplus multiplier. Run past it and the job books a shortfall — and you decide whether the crew carries it into its next surplus or the company absorbs it. A running crew balance and a company surplus ledger keep every result attributed to a crew and a job.
Also called: hourly plus surplus · crew bonus · finish early bonus · hourly crew pay · crew incentive pay · shortfall
Every hour paid, with no minimum day
Each person is paid every hour they log, at their own rate — set per person, or falling back to the crew's rate. There is no daily minimum and no rule about what counts as a day. The hours come off one tap in and one tap out on the crew's field links.
A day-rate threshold turns every early finish into an argument about whether it counted as a day.
Hourly is how many crews are already hired, so the model keeps the wage everyone understands and adds the incentive on top.
A multiplier for the people who carry the job
The surplus is split by hours × each person's surplus multiplier. Leave everyone at 1.00 and it is a plain share of the hours. Give a crew leader 1.2 and his hours count for a little more; a new hand at 0.8 a little less. Admins, sales managers and project managers set rates and multipliers; nobody else can change them.
Some leaders carry a weak crew over the line every week, and a split by hours alone pays them exactly the same as the man they carried.
A multiplier on the share — not on the wage — rewards the result without turning every rate into a negotiation.
Run long, and somebody decides who carries it
A job that runs past its figured days books a shortfall, and it waits for a decision: Who carries this shortfall? If it was the crew's, the crew carries it, and its next surplus pays it down before anyone takes a bonus. If it was yours — a late delivery, a change of plan — the company absorbs it, and the ledger records that too. Admins and project managers are alerted when a crew passes its figured days, while there is still time to do something about it.
A job that was supposed to take seven days took nine, the money went somewhere, and nobody could say whose it was.
Overruns are only fair to carry when somebody decides whose they were, so the decision is a step, not a default.
A crew balance and a company ledger
Every crew has a running balance across its jobs: surplus earned, surplus paid, shortfall carried. Above them sits the company surplus ledger — every crew's result summed, and what the company absorbed — so the business can see where its labour money came from and went. The same numbers roll up into Accounting under Crew payouts.
A bonus scheme nobody can audit is a bonus scheme that dies the first time a crew asks how the number was worked out.
Balances are added up from the job results every time they are shown, never stored, so they cannot drift from the jobs underneath them.
Simulate a run of jobs before you commit
Simulations lets you put made-up jobs in a row — one finishes early, one runs long through the crew's fault, one runs long through yours — and watch the crew balance, the company-absorbed total, the bonuses and each person's take-home move across all of them. It runs the same arithmetic as the real payout, so what you rehearse and what you pay cannot disagree.
A pay scheme explained with one example falls apart on the second job, when the shortfall from the first one has to come from somewhere.
The part of this model that matters most — a carried shortfall paid down from the next surplus — only shows up across several jobs.
The crew sees its own record
On their field link the crew can see their own record — stages finished early, on time or late, and the surplus and shortfall behind them. Nobody has to take the office's word for the number.
A bonus the crew can't see is a rumour, not an incentive.
An incentive only works if the people it is meant for can watch it move.
- 1In Settings → Pay Structure → Hourly + Surplus, set each person's hourly rate and surplus multiplier — 1.00 is a plain share of the hours; a crew leader might carry 1.2.
- 2Write on the job how many days its labour was figured for. The budget is those days times what a planned day of that crew costs, plus the equipment allowance.
- 3The crew clocks in and out on their field links; every hour is paid at the person's rate, with no minimum day.
- 4When the job is done it is booked on its own: a surplus is shared out by weighted hours, and a shortfall waits for a decision.
- 5Decide who carries a shortfall — the crew, paid down first from its next surplus, or the company, absorbed and recorded.
- 6Admins and project managers are alerted when a crew runs past its figured days and when a shortfall needs a decision.
- 7Rehearse it first in Simulations: run a series of jobs, mark whose fault each overrun was, and watch the crew balance and each person's take-home.
Plenty of builders pay by the hour and plenty of crews are hired on it, but straight hourly pay points the incentive the wrong way: work faster, earn less. This keeps the hourly wage — every hour paid, no six-hour minimum to argue about — and adds the part that makes finishing early worth something: the budget the job was figured for, and a share of whatever the crew leaves in it. Two things a flat split could not do. Not every hour on a crew is worth the same to the result — a leader who carries a weak day has earned more of the surplus than his hours alone say — so each person has a multiplier. And a job that runs long has to land somewhere: when the overrun was the crew's, the crew carries it into the next job; when it was yours — a late delivery, a change of plan — the company takes it, and the ledger shows which.
- Straight hourly pay giving the crew no stake in finishing inside the days figured
- A bonus split by hours alone that ignores who carried the job
- Overruns with no consequence for anyone and no record of whose they were
Six ways to pay a crew
You do not pay every crew the same way. Each crew is set to its own model, and that choice decides what its screen asks for and how its labour is costed on the job. Crews are also marked as your own employees or as subcontractors.
