Your Shop Drawings Are Payroll With No Pay App
You spent five weeks on drafting, submittals, and veneer samples, none of it reached a pay application, and the architect decided when that window closed.
A trade that mobilizes the week it wins starts producing installed, billable work immediately. A millwork shop has to design the product before the product exists, because it doesn't exist until your drafter draws it and an architect signs it. That makes engineering a production department with its own payroll falling entirely on the wrong side of the first pay application.
The size of it
Weeks of drafter and PM wages come out of your own cash on every job, and they double when the drawings come back for a second review. The money leaves in month one and turns into revenue in month four, so the job reads like a loser right up until install week.
Millwork gets engineered in full before a single sheet gets cut. Shop drawings, finish samples, veneer submittals, and hardware cut sheets all go up for review, and the design team holds the clock on every one of them. Remmert is blunt that there's no correct number of days for an architect's approval, and the lead time on your panel and hardware buy starts at approved, not at awarded. Every drafting and PM hour inside that window is real payroll charged against a job showing zero percent complete on the GC's schedule of values. Then the drawings come back marked up and you fund a second round out of the same pocket.
Three moves, in order
Step 01: Job cost structure
Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.
What else costs millwork and casework contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What millwork and casework owners ask
How to cost shop drawing and submittal hours before the job is billable?
You spent five weeks on drafting, submittals, and veneer samples, none of it reached a pay application, and the architect decided when that window closed.
What does it cost?
Weeks of drafter and PM wages come out of your own cash on every job, and they double when the drawings come back for a second review. The money leaves in month one and turns into revenue in month four, so the job reads like a loser right up until install week.
What do I do first?
Give engineering its own cost code and its own phase in the job cost structure, so drafting and submittal hours hit the job instead of overhead, where they vanish.
What are millwork and casework contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates millwork and casework, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Interiors, which runs 19% gross margin, 13% overhead and 6% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not millwork and casework's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 01, job cost structure. Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words. It comes from chapter 1 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for millwork and casework contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.