Warranty Starts at Ship Date, Yours Starts at Turnover
Gear bought in month six to beat lead times burns a year of manufacturer coverage before the owner ever accepts the building. Failures fall between the two clocks and you buy the part.
Cameras, controllers, power supplies, and readers carry warranty measured from ship or purchase date, and on a 20 to 24 month build that clock runs while the gear sits in your warehouse and then in a ceiling. Your contract still owes a full twelve months from substantial completion, so the overlap you genuinely have shrinks every time procurement does its job well. This is the trade where the schedule fix and the warranty exposure are the same purchase order.
The size of it
Every failure in that window costs you a truck roll plus a replacement part bought at full list. On a 120 camera job with normal infant mortality that runs into several thousand dollars of parts and a week of tech time charged to a closed job.
Fund a warranty reserve on every job at buyout, sized by how much manufacturer coverage you burned by buying early. The discipline that protects your schedule is the same discipline that wrecks your warranty position: the earlier procurement moves, the less coverage is left when the twelve month contractual clock starts at substantial completion. Nobody catches this at bid, because the exposure is created months later when a PM buys gear to hold a lead time. Record the manufacturer ship date on every serialized device at receiving so you know, per job, how many months of cover you own. Then either buy the extended term at PO or reserve for it out of the job that created it, so a month fourteen camera failure stops hitting a job that closed a year ago.
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 security systems contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What security systems owners ask
Camera manufacturer warranty expired before substantial completion?
Gear bought in month six to beat lead times burns a year of manufacturer coverage before the owner ever accepts the building. Failures fall between the two clocks and you buy the part.
What does it cost?
Every failure in that window costs you a truck roll plus a replacement part bought at full list. On a 120 camera job with normal infant mortality that runs into several thousand dollars of parts and a week of tech time charged to a closed job.
What do I do first?
Capture manufacturer ship date and serial number for every device at receiving and store it against the job, not just the PO.
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 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.
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.