Your Last 20% Sits Behind the Owner's IT Department
Everything is hung and terminated, and none of it runs until the owner's IT group cuts the VLAN. The job parks at 90 percent complete with the contract tail on your balance sheet.
The Division 28 head-end lives on the owner's network, so cameras, controllers, the VMS, and the access control server all need IP addressing, a dedicated VLAN, PoE ports, firewall rules, AD service accounts, and often a cybersecurity review before you can program one device. Every one of those belongs to the owner's IT department, a group that signed no contract with the GC and carries no schedule obligation or liquidated damages exposure, so the GC can neither accelerate them nor extend you for them. Every other trade on the job finishes when its own work is finished, while you finish when somebody else's network engineer finds time.
The size of it
The final 15 to 25 percent of contract value plus retention stalls at 90 percent complete with no schedule remedy. On a $400K job that's $60K to $100K of earned work sitting as underbilling while you cover payroll out of pocket.
Get the network cut onto the GC's schedule as a dated deliverable with an owner IT contact attached to it, and split your schedule of values so physical completion releases physical money. Most integrators bill one line that says install and commission, which lets the GC hold the whole tail hostage to a network engineer who has never seen your contract. Send a written requirements packet at buyout listing VLAN, IP scheme, PoE port count, firewall rules, and service accounts, with a required-by date, and log the day you sent it. Then count the days from that request to the VLAN cut on every job and put the count in front of the GC in writing every month it grows. Documented request plus measured delay is the only leverage that exists here, and it's the difference between a schedule conversation and absorbing four months of carry nobody ever acknowledges.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them.
What else costs security systems contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What security systems owners ask
Can't commission access control until owner IT sets up the vlan?
Everything is hung and terminated, and none of it runs until the owner's IT group cuts the VLAN. The job parks at 90 percent complete with the contract tail on your balance sheet.
What does it cost?
The final 15 to 25 percent of contract value plus retention stalls at 90 percent complete with no schedule remedy. On a $400K job that's $60K to $100K of earned work sitting as underbilling while you cover payroll out of pocket.
What do I do first?
Split the schedule of values so device install and termination bill separately from commissioning, and get it approved before the first pay app.
What are security systems contractors supposed to be making?
Security systems runs 22% gross margin, 16% overhead and 6% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 1 points below it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
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.