Detailing burns cash for two months before a piece ships
Sixty grand of Tekla time and delegated engineering calcs are already spent, the engineer is on his second round of comments, and your schedule of values has nothing to bill against.
Steel is the one package where a design deliverable you pay for sits between award and the first piece of production. Detailing and delegated engineering are engineering labor billed to the fabricator, consumed entirely before material is cut, so there's no percent complete to claim and no stored material to invoice against it. Every week the EOR spends on comments is a week your working capital funds someone else's review.
The size of it
Five to ten percent of package value goes out over eight to sixteen weeks with zero progress billing. On a $2M package that's $100,000 to $200,000 of cash gone before a pay application carries anything real.
Nothing releases for fabrication until shop and erection drawings come back approved from the engineer of record. Detailing in Tekla or SDS2 runs four to ten weeks, EOR review is two to four weeks in the contract and routinely longer once resubmittals start, and where the moment connection and shear connection design is delegated, your own PE seals calcs that the EOR then reviews on a second clock. All of that is your money, paid to detailers and engineers on their terms, and most schedules of values carry no line for it because there's nothing standing on site to point at. The first pay application on a steel package often shows mobilization and nothing else, months into the job.
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 structural steel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What structural steel owners ask
How do I bill for detailing before fabrication starts?
Sixty grand of Tekla time and delegated engineering calcs are already spent, the engineer is on his second round of comments, and your schedule of values has nothing to bill against.
What does it cost?
Five to ten percent of package value goes out over eight to sixteen weeks with zero progress billing. On a $2M package that's $100,000 to $200,000 of cash gone before a pay application carries anything real.
What do I do first?
Add detailing and delegated engineering as their own line items in the schedule of values at bid time, tied to approved drawings, and negotiate them in before award.
What are structural steel contractors supposed to be making?
Structural steel runs 23% gross margin, 15% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 1 points above 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.