Labour rate, with material, lump sum or item rate: sub-contractor work orders that settle cleanly

The plaster contractor says the rate was ₹28 a square foot. The site manager remembers ₹26. Nobody wrote it down, because it was agreed standing on the slab with a hundred other things going on, and now it is the difference between a fair final payment and a month of phone calls.

Sub-contractors are not the problem. Unwritten terms are. The fix is a short record per job, made when the job is handed over, that both sides can read.

The four ways a job is usually contracted

1. 1Labour rate. You supply the material; they supply the labour, paid per unit of work done, such as per square foot of plaster or per brass of masonry. Measurement decides the bill.
2. 2With material. They supply labour and material, and the rate covers both. Check quantity and quality on delivery, because the material is now inside their price.
3. 3Lump sum. A fixed amount for a defined scope. The scope is the whole contract, so it has to be written in enough detail that "finished" means the same thing to both of you.
4. 4Item rate. A rate per item of work: per door frame fixed, per electrical point, per tank. Counting decides the bill.

None of these is better than the others. What matters is that each job says which one it is, because the way you check the bill follows from it.

What a work order should hold

• The site, and the stage of work it belongs to.
• The sub-contractor, their trade and phone number.
• The contract type, the rate and the unit it is per.
• The agreed amount, and a start and end date.
• A status: ongoing or completed.

Pay against the order, not against the person

A sub-contractor working on two sites with three jobs between them is owed three different balances. Paying "on account" to the person merges them, and three months later nobody can say which job is settled. Record every payment against a specific work order, with the date and the method (cash, bank, UPI or cheque), and the balance on each job is simply agreed minus paid.

Give them their own view of the account

Half the calls a site office takes from sub-contractors are questions about their own balance. A read-only login that shows a sub-contractor their work orders, the stages assigned to them and every payment made to them answers those questions without a call. The same view can let them report a stage finished, or ask for more material against it, with nothing changing until the office approves.

Sitegride records work orders in exactly this shape, on the site and stage they belong to, with the four contract types, payments against each order, and an optional read-only login for each sub-contractor. Receipts for payments can be shared on WhatsApp as a PDF.