Free tool
Pay the Crew for Finishing Early Without Touching Your Margin
You priced the job with your margin already in it. When the crew puts it up in fewer days than you figured, the labour money left over was never profit — it was budget. Here is what happens if you share it.
Put your own crew in and see what a week is worth
Your real rates, your real days. Change any number and every figure below moves with it — nothing is saved and nothing is sent.
finished on time
7
spread over five days
$8,708
7 days figured
$2,100
a day saved saves this too
$254
| Worker | Rate $/hr | Multiplier | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Hrs | Days | Hours pay | Bonus | Takes home | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 58.75 | 7 | $2,232.50 | +$103.22 | $2,335.72 | |||||||||||
| 55.5 | 7 | $1,665.00 | +$69.66 | $1,734.66 | |||||||||||
| 53.75 | 7 | $1,505.00 | +$53.97 | $1,558.97 | |||||||||||
| 43.25 | 6 | $951.50 | +$27.15 | $978.65 |
$6,608
$944
$31.28/hr
211.25
7 days figured, 7 on site — finished on time. Finishing inside the figured days leaves budget unspent, and all of it goes back to the crew — split by hours worked, weighted by each person's surplus multiplier.
Made-up numbers, nothing saved, capped at seven days so the grid stays readable. The same calculator inside the platform runs any number of days — and a series of jobs, carrying a crew’s shortfall from one into the next until a surplus pays it down.
The multiplier, in plain terms
Every person's hours carry a weight when the surplus is split. Leave everyone on 1 and the surplus divides by hours worked, straight down the line. Change it and you are saying this person's hour is worth more, or less, of the bonus — not of their wage. Their hourly pay never changes. Only their share of money the job did not need.
1— the default. Pulling their weight. Most of the crew sits here.1.25–1.5— the ones who set the pace. A crew leader running the day, or a second who is genuinely faster and brings the others with him.0.5— carried. Learning, or having a rough month. Still paid every hour they worked; just not an equal cut of a bonus they did not drive.0.2— there in body. Rare, and a conversation rather than a setting. If somebody sits here for long, the multiplier is not the problem.
A worked example. Four men, seven days figured, in on the sixth. Everyone on 1: the surplus splits by hours and the apprentice who missed a day gets proportionally less, automatically. Put the crew leader on 1.5 and roughly a third more of it lands on him — out of the same pot, not out of anybody's wage.
The honest warning: this only works if the multipliers are set once, openly, and left alone. A weight that moves every week is a wage cut nobody agreed to, and the crew will read it that way.
Why sharing the surplus costs you nothing you counted on
A post-frame job gets figured at a number of days, and the price carries the margin you decided on. The labour in that price is budget, not profit — you already agreed to spend it.
When the crew finishes in eleven days instead of fourteen, three days of labour budget is left sitting there. Keep all of it and you have quietly changed the deal: the crew worked harder and the only party better off is the office. Do that twice and they stop hurrying.
Share it and the incentive points the same way your business does. The job that finishes early frees the crew for the next one, which is the actual win — the surplus is just what makes the crew want it too.
The catch nobody mentions: this only works if the days are recorded honestly, on the job, by the people doing it. A pay model that depends on a paper time sheet at the end of the week is a pay model built on an argument.
The app your crew actually holds
Tap through it. This is the whole field app — five tabs, no login, no app store.
Clock in, and the hours land on the right job
A pay model that depends on remembering the week is a pay model built on an argument. The crew opens a link that already knows who they are and which job they are on — no password, no app store, nothing to install. Hours attach to the job that was figured, the day they happen, so the surplus settles itself instead of being negotiated at payroll.
The whole app, full screen on this page — every tab, every number, live, exactly as it is in the field. Your crew installs it when you are ready; this is the look first.
See it full screenClock in, and the hours land on the right job
A pay model that depends on remembering the week is a pay model built on an argument. The crew opens a link that already knows who they are and which job they are on — no password, no app store, nothing to install. Hours attach to the job that was figured, the day they happen, so the surplus settles itself instead of being negotiated at payroll.
The four things today actually needs
Deliberately plain. A crew lead standing in mud with gloves on gets the direct actions and nothing else: who is on site, what stage the job is at, what is next. Everything clever happens behind it.
Proof of the stage, and what the customer gets to see
A checkpoint is finished when there is a photograph against it — which is exactly what stops "finished early" turning into "rushed". The crew also picks which shots reach the customer's live dashboard, so the owner sees progress without a single phone call asking for it.
The days you are going to lose, before you lose them
Wind that will not let you stand a wall, rain that will not let you pour. The app flags the days ahead that are likely to shut the site down, so the schedule moves on a Tuesday instead of being discovered on the Friday. Weather days are the most common reason a job runs past what it was figured at.
Every number here came from somebody clocking in
That is the whole trick. Nobody fills in a report — the hours people already record become the crew's own scoreboard: how the week went, how the job went, where they stand against what it was figured at. Give a crew a number they can move and finishing early becomes something they are proud of rather than something the office asked for.
Every hour in the calculator above starts as somebody pressing Clock In on this screen.
What the office sees
What this fixes for a multi-crew operation
One crew, you can hold in your head. Six crews across three states is a different problem.
You find out a job ran long at payroll
By then it is a conversation about money instead of a decision about the schedule.
Nobody agrees whose fault the extra days were
Weather and a late truss delivery are the company's. A crew that lost two days is the crew's. Without a record it is whoever argues hardest.
Good crews subsidise slow ones
A flat hourly rate pays the same for eleven days and for fourteen, so the fast crew funds the slow one and eventually notices.
You cannot tell which crew actually makes money
Job costing that stops at materials tells you nothing about the half of the cost that walks onto site every morning.
How it fits the rest of the job
The estimate figures the days
Labour comes off the building you drew, not a percentage of materials.
The schedule commits to them
Stages and checkpoints carry the figured days, so the plan and the pay model use the same number.
The crew records against them
Hours attach to the job and the stage from the field, the day they happen.
The surplus settles itself
Approve the week and the split is already worked out, with any shortfall assigned to whoever actually carries it.
Keep going
Questions builders ask
What is an hourly plus shared surplus pay structure?
The crew is paid their normal hourly rate for the hours they work. If the job finishes in fewer days than it was figured at, the labour budget left over is the surplus, and an agreed share of it is paid to the crew on top. The margin priced into the job is untouched either way.
Does this cost me more than paying hourly?
No. The surplus only exists when a job comes in under the labour budget you already priced. You are sharing money you had committed to spend, not money you had counted as profit.
What happens when a job runs long instead?
That is a shortfall, and the useful question is who carries it. Weather, a late delivery or a design change are the company's; a crew that lost days to its own pace is the crew's. Recording that when it happens is what stops it becoming an argument at payroll.
Will the crew rush and drop quality?
That is the real risk, and it is why the checkpoints matter more under this model than a flat rate. A stage is not finished because someone says so — it is finished when the checkpoint is ticked with a photo against it.
Does this work for day rate as well as hourly?
Yes. The same surplus maths runs on a day rate, and the only difference is how the base pay is counted before the split — a rate per day worked rather than a rate per hour. Both are supported, and a company can run one crew on each.
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