Free download — no email required
T&M billing has two halves and this template keeps them apart: a labor table (date, worker, hours, rate) and a materials table (item, cost, markup) — with the markup math built into the Excel version and a receipts-attached checkbox, because on T&M work the receipts arethe invoice's credibility.
A T&M invoice is only as strong as the agreement behind it. Before any work starts, the client should have in writing: the labor rates by role (lead, helper, sub trades if they pass through you), the materials markup as a stated percent, the billing rhythm (weekly, biweekly, monthly), and what counts as billable time — drive time and supply runs included or not, named either way. Every one of those is a friendly sentence before the job and an argument after the third invoice.
Then the invoice becomes boring, which is the goal: the same rates the agreement named, applied to documented hours and documented receipts, on the promised rhythm. Boring invoices get paid. Surprising ones get meetings. (A cap or not-to-exceed clause is common on bigger T&M work — whether to offer one is a business call, and how to word it is a lawyer call, not a template's.)
Not in the template — in the capture. Fixed-price jobs can eat a missing receipt quietly (your margin pays). On T&M the missing receipt is money you simply never bill: the client owes actual costs, and a cost you cannot show is a cost you eat. Same for the half-hour that never made a timesheet. T&M rewards contractors with airtight capture and quietly taxes everyone else — the general contractor invoice template is the right tool for fixed-price work, but this one only pays off if the inputs are complete.
When to bill which way, in one breath: fixed price when the scope is knowable and you want to be paid for estimating well; T&M when the scope genuinely is not knowable — exploratory demo, water damage, "while you're in there" work — and pretending otherwise would just pad the fixed bid with guess-insurance. Clients accept T&M most readily when the documentation habit above is visible from invoice one: rates they recognized, hours they can picture, receipts they can check.
That is the honest pitch for doing this in an app instead of a spreadsheet eventually: crew hours are logged to the job when they clock in, receipts are photographed at the counter, and the project invoice fills in from what you recorded (the receipts you mark reimbursable come with their photos) for you to review before it goes out. Free forever for 3 projects and 50 receipts a month — on iPhone or in any browser. The template stays free either way.
An invoice that bills actual labor hours at agreed rates plus actual material costs (usually with a stated markup), instead of one fixed price. It is how T&M and cost-plus arrangements get billed — and it lives or dies on documentation, which is why this template itemizes both halves.
List each purchase with its cost and apply the markup your agreement states — the Excel version does that math per line. Then back it with the receipts. A materials line a client can check against a receipt photo is a materials line nobody argues about.
If your agreement bills materials at cost plus markup, yes — receipts are the proof that "cost" means cost. The template carries a receipts-attached checkbox on purpose. Attaching them turns billing disputes into thirty-second confirmations.
Close cousins. T&M typically bills labor at set rates plus materials; cost-plus bills all actual costs plus a fee or percentage. Both need the same discipline: every hour and every receipt captured and shown. Our cost-plus invoicing page covers that model in full.
Weekly or biweekly on open-ended work, on a rhythm the agreement names up front. T&M invoices age badly — a month of unbilled hours stops being an invoice and becomes a negotiation. Small, regular, well-documented invoices keep the number familiar and the payments moving.
Yes — no email, no signup, use it forever. We build an app that does this automatically (hours from GPS clock-in, receipts photographed to the job, the invoice assembled with proof attached); the template is free whether or not you ever try it.