PRECAST CONCRETE · CONCRETE AND MASONRY · FIXED BY STEP 01

A yard full of panels the contract won't let you bill

Four hundred thousand dollars of panels are laying on dunnage, cast, cured, and piece marked, and none of it is billable this month.

WHY IT IS A PRECAST CONCRETE PROBLEM

For most subs, material sitting in a warehouse is a purchase waiting to be installed, and the supplier's terms carry it. For a precaster it's finished goods with your own labor and burden already cured into it, stamped with that project's piece marks so it can't be returned or moved to another job. The working capital hole is your own production cost laying on dunnage, and it grows every day the bed runs on schedule.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

You carry $200k to $500k of finished goods on your own money for six to twelve weeks. It gets funded by stretching AP with the strand and cement suppliers who are the same people gating your next job.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

15%

CFOS target 14% for precast concrete.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

22%

CFOS target 24% for precast concrete.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

CFOS target 10% for precast concrete.

Erection sequence sets casting order, which is why the yard fills up long before the site can take a single piece. A bed cycles roughly daily, so a 60 piece package gets cast over eight to twelve weeks and then ships just in time against crane availability. That inventory sits at the plant by definition, which makes it offsite stored material, and stored material clauses commonly refuse offsite storage outright. Where the contract does allow it, it wants advance written approval, a bill of sale transferring title, piece mark or serial documentation, a storage location spelled out by address, and property of others insurance with the owner as loss payee. Shops that didn't get that paperwork into the subcontract at buyout simply don't bill it, and the cement, strand, labor, and burden are all already spent.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Before you sign at buyout, read the stored material clause out loud: offsite allowed or refused, what approval it needs, and what documentation triggers payment.

STEP 02

Build the packet once and reuse it on every job: bill of sale, piece mark schedule, storage location, and an insurance certificate that lists the owner as loss payee.

STEP 03

Report cast but not shipped as its own line in job cost every month so you can see how much of your cash is parked in the yard.

THE FIX

Step 01: Job cost structure

Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.

CFOS-01 · CHAPTER 1

Job cost codes that match how you bid the work

What this step changes, what it depends on, and how to tell it's installed.

BENCHMARKS

Precast concrete by revenue band

Every one of the 7 bands carries the CFOS target beside the published figure.

ACROSS EVERY TRADE

Cost codes the field ignores

You have 200 cost codes. The crews use four of them, and one is called Miscellaneous.

SAME TRADE

What else costs precast concrete contractors money

PRECAST CONCRETE · CFOS-02

Your mold is a one-job asset you pay for up front

Sixty grand of steel forms is sitting in the yard for a job that hasn't billed a dollar, and the piece count just got value engineered down after award.

PRECAST CONCRETE · CFOS-06

The casting bed sits empty while the architect reviews

Drawings have sat on somebody else's desk for five weeks. Your bed is reserved for that job, and it's casting nothing all week.

PRECAST CONCRETE · CFOS-06

Three more trips to that job after the crane goes home

You go back for welding and drypack, then caulk a season later, then patch at punch, and the GC picks the week for every one of them.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

CONCRETE

Ten Jobs Used Those Forms, One Job Paid for Them

Your yard is full of panels and shoring, every job report says you made money, and the bank account disagrees. The form buy hit job one and jobs two through ten carried none of it.

DEMOLITION

The Scale Wants Cash Today, The GC Pays In Sixty Days

Almost everything a demolition job costs goes out in the first two weeks, and the first pay application hasn't even been submitted yet.

FLOORING

You bankroll the mill six months before you get paid

The mill wants a check before it ships, the GC won't pay for stored material, and your cash sits in a warehouse for four months waiting on a space that isn't ready.

QUESTIONS

What precast concrete owners ask

Can i bill for precast panels stored at my plant before delivery?

Four hundred thousand dollars of panels are laying on dunnage, cast, cured, and piece marked, and none of it is billable this month.

What does it cost?

What do I do first?

Before you sign at buyout, read the stored material clause out loud: offsite allowed or refused, what approval it needs, and what documentation triggers payment.

What are precast concrete contractors supposed to be making?

Precast concrete runs 22% gross margin, 15% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits right on it. The CFOS target is 10%.

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.

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

MASTER ELECTRICIAN · 150+ PROJECTS · $2.1B+ MANAGED

Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.

Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.