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A RocketLevel guide for restoration owners, project managers, estimators, and accounts receivable (AR) staff, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 7-minute read.
On a large commercial loss, your time-and-materials (T&M) invoice often does not go straight to a check. The carrier brings in a third-party building consultant or forensic auditor (firms like Sedgwick, J.S. Held, or Envista) to review the file before it pays. Their role is to confirm that the charges match the documentation: that the equipment ran for the days billed, the labor was reasonable for the work, the consumables were really used, and the rates were the ones agreed.
A clean review is the fastest path to full payment. The bill that survives a third-party audit untouched is the one where every line is backed by proof taken at the time and, ideally, agreed on site as the job ran.
That work happens on site, every day: document the work and confirm progress with the reviewer as you go, so the final bill is a summary of things both sides already agreed.
Equipment-days are often the biggest line a reviewer examines, and one of the most often reduced. The reason is simple: a unit that kept running after the zone already met dry standard is a charge the documentation cannot support. That is a drying-discipline problem, and it is yours to fix.
The discipline:
When the pull date in your log matches the dry date in your readings, a reviewer has no basis to reduce equipment-days, because the file already shows you stopped billing the moment the zone was dry.
Labor is the second place a file gets questioned. A crew that looks over-supervised invites a reduction, because a reviewer reads it as hours that were not all necessary for the work.
There is no published industry standard ratio here, and you should be wary of anyone who quotes you one as if there were. What reviewers actually test is whether the span of control on the file looks proportionate to the work described that day. As a RocketLevel working reference point, roughly one supervisor per five technicians on a straightforward production crew rarely draws a question. Use it as a starting point for your own standard operating procedure (SOP); complex or high-risk sites routinely justify more oversight. Either way, your labor file should show a sensible span of control, and where the ratio is richer than the norm, the daily log should say why (confined-space work, multiple separated zones, a safety-critical phase). Tie every supervisor hour to a reason the same way you tie technician hours to a task.
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A defensible labor file shows that the supervision you billed matched what the job actually required, day by day. Cutting supervision is not the goal.
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