How to Invoice After Footings: A Concrete Contractor’s Guide

Short answer: To invoice after footings, concrete gets billed by the cubic yard placed — width in feet × depth in feet × length in linear feet ÷ 27 — with the yardage on the ready-mix ticket as your backup. Around that volume, bill excavation separately, form boards by the linear foot, rebar by the bar or by weight, and any short-load, wait-time, or pump charge as its own line. Photograph the steel before the pour.

Footings are the only concrete work you bill for something nobody will ever see again. By the time the invoice is read, the pour is under a wall, and the entire argument for the number rests on documents you either collected on pour day or did not. That changes what the invoice has to carry compared with a driveway or a patio, where the customer can walk on the evidence. The general blocks live in what to include on an invoice; the rest of this is trench-specific.

What is actually being sold on a footings invoice?

Volume, plus the work of holding that volume in the right place at the right elevation. Those are two separate cost centers and they belong on two separate lines.

Footings are form-and-steel heavy in a way flatwork never is. On a slab, most of your hours go into placing and finishing a surface. On footings, most of your hours go into digging a straight trench to a dead-level bottom, setting and bracing boards, tying continuous bar with laps and corner bars, setting dowels or a keyway for whatever gets built on top, and waiting on an inspector. The concrete itself gets dumped, rodded, and left rough, because a footing has no finish.

So the invoice should read as three groups: what got excavated, what got built to receive the concrete, and how many yards went in. A single lump-sum line for “footings” invites the one question you cannot answer after the fact.

Where does the yardage on the invoice come from?

From two numbers that should agree, and a written explanation when they do not.

The first is the neat-line calculation off your own layout: width in feet times depth in feet times length in linear feet, divided by 27. That is what the drawing says should fit in the ground.

Footing size (W × D)	ft³ per linear foot	yd³ per 100 lf
16” × 8”	0.89	3.3
16” × 12”	1.33	4.9
20” × 10”	1.39	5.1
24” × 12”	2.00	7.4
30” × 12”	2.50	9.3

Pads and piers get counted each, not by the foot. A 24” × 24” pad at 12” deep is 4 ft³, so it takes 0.15 yd³ — ten of them is a yard and a half you will absolutely forget if you only measured the continuous run.

The second number is the ready-mix ticket, and on a trench pour it is almost always larger. That gap has a name, and it is the single most expensive habit in footing work: over-excavation. A trench cut wide by two inches on a 100-foot run at 12 inches deep is nearly two-thirds of a yard nobody bid. Sandy or wet ground sloughs and takes more. A bucket that wandered deep takes more. A trench left open through a rain takes the most of all.

Bill the placed yardage, show both figures, and state the reason on the invoice in one line. “Neat line 4.9 yd³, placed 6.0 yd³ — trench sloughing in sand, photos attached” is a defensible sentence. Silently billing 6.0 against a bid of 4.9 is not, even though it is the same money.

Which line items belong on a footings invoice?

The ones a customer will otherwise assume were included.

• Layout and excavation, by the linear foot or by the hour, with spoil handling stated: spread on site, stockpiled, or hauled off by the load.
• Depth to code, called out where it drove the price. Exterior footings generally have to sit at least 12 inches below undisturbed ground and below the local frost line — the baseline is IRC R403.1.4, and your jurisdiction’s frost depth is what actually governs. A 42-inch frost depth is a different trench from a 12-inch one and should not be buried in a lump sum.
• Forms, by the linear foot, with stakes and bracing. Stepped footings on a slope carry a bulkhead at every step, and each step is labor with no yardage attached.
• Rebar, by the bar or by weight, with laps, corner bars, chairs, and any dowels for the wall above listed as their own quantity.
• Concrete, by the yard, with the mix stated: strength in psi, and any fiber, air entrainment, or admixture that was ordered.
• Delivery charges from the supplier ticket, passed through and named. Short-load fees when you order less than your plant’s minimum, wait-time charges once the free unloading window expires, and after-hours or Saturday delivery.
• Pump or conveyor, when the trucks cannot reach the trench, plus the minimum-hours charge that comes with it.
• Weather measures, because footings do not wait for a nice week. Cold-weather work brings accelerator, blankets, and heated enclosures; hot-weather work brings retarder, ice or chilled water, and an earlier start. Both are real cost and neither belongs absorbed in the yard price.
• Backfill and compaction, if you did it, separately from excavation.

What changed between the estimate and the invoice?

On footings, something usually did, because you priced the drawing and poured the ground.

What happened	What it added to the invoice
Inspector required a deeper trench for frost or bearing	Extra excavation, extra yards, extra bar
Soil would not hold a neat trench wall	Placed yardage above the neat line, documented with photos
Water in the trench	Pumping, dewatering time, possibly a re-dig after a rain
Rock or an old footing hit during excavation	Breaking, removal, and disposal — hourly, dated
Engineer upsized the footing after a soils report	New width and depth across the whole run
Wall design changed to a keyway or heavier dowel schedule	Additional steel and forming
Trucks could not reach the back of the lot	Pump or conveyor, plus its minimum charge

Each one needs a dated line, the quantity, and who approved it and how. A change folded into the base yardage looks like you raised your price. The same change written as “additional excavation to 42 inches per inspector 6/14, approved by text” looks like a record.

How do I price my own yard instead of copying somebody’s number?

Because the yard price you find online belongs to another market with different haul distances, different soil, and a different plant.

1. Split the units first. Cubic yards for placed concrete. Linear feet for excavation and forms. Each for pads, piers, and steps. Hours for rock, dewatering, and standby.
2. Cost material from the takeoff, then add a placement allowance. Yards from the neat-line volume plus a stated allowance for trench conditions. Steel from an actual bar schedule with lap lengths counted, not a guess per foot.
3. Use your own crew rates. Hours per 100 linear feet to dig, to form and brace, to tie, to place and rod, and to strip. Stepped and stepped-again footings on a hillside are a different rate from a flat rectangle, so keep them as separate rates rather than averaging.
4. Multiply by loaded hourly cost. Wages plus payroll burden plus the excavator, the skid steer, the truck, fuel, insurance, and the forms you keep replacing.
5. Add overhead. Yearly fixed cost divided by the hours you actually bill, which is a much smaller number than the hours you work.
6. Add profit as a margin, and do the arithmetic correctly. A job costing $6,400 marked up 25 percent bills at $8,000 — that is a 20 percent margin, not 25. To keep 25 percent you divide by 0.75 and bill $8,533. Markup and margin get used interchangeably in this trade, and the difference — $1,600 kept against the $2,133 you intended — is a quarter of your profit on every pour.

Published per-yard and per-linear-foot ranges swing with region, frost depth, access, soil, and season, and they move again every time cement or diesel moves. They are a sanity check for catching an error of a factor of two. They are not a price.

What do I hand over when the footing is about to be buried?

The evidence, because in about a week there will be a wall on top of it.

• Photos before the pour, with a tape in frame: trench width, trench depth from a string line, bar size and spacing, laps, corner bars, chairs holding steel off the dirt, and the dowel layout.
• The inspection card or approval, if the footing was inspected. This is the cleanest third-party document you will ever get, and it costs nothing to photograph.
• Every ready-mix ticket, showing yards, mix design, batch time, and site time. Suppliers only keep tickets so long, and the one you need is the one from the job that goes sideways.
• Elevation confirmation, a photo of the top-of-footing at the benchmark, so the framer or mason cannot claim you left them chasing an inch.
• Cure and strip notes, plus your written statement of what you warrant. Footings crack, and honest warranty language separates shrinkage from settlement and names what is outside your control: the customer’s site drainage, the fill nobody let you replace, and the design you were handed.

Then say plainly where your work stops. Your obligation ends at a footing at the specified size, elevation, and strength. What gets built on it is somebody else’s line item.

How do I get paid the day the trucks leave?

Invoice on site, on pour day, while the trench is still open enough to point at.

Concrete has a cash rhythm no other trade has. Your ready-mix bill starts aging the moment the truck leaves the plant, and on a new account it may be cash on delivery. That means every day a footings invoice sits unsent is a day you are financing a supplier’s terms with your own account. Raise the invoice from the phone before the forms come off, attach the ticket photos, and put the payment link on it as a QR code the customer can scan standing at the trench.

Two things stay on your radar after that. On builder and general contractor work you are on their draw cycle regardless, so get your pay application in ahead of their cutoff and know what percentage is being held as retainage. And on any job of size, know your state’s preliminary notice and mechanic’s lien deadlines before the invoice ages, because concrete is unambiguously an improvement to real property and the lien is real leverage — the general collection sequence is in how to get clients to pay, and the lien clock runs whether or not you are using it.

What records keep a buried pour provable?

The layout measurements, the pre-pour photo set, the inspection approval, every delivery ticket, the change-order texts, the numbered invoice, and the material receipts behind each line.

Keel exists for the part of that which has to happen standing in mud. It is an iOS app that runs entirely on the device — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label reading Data Not Collected — so a footing pour on a lot with no signal still produces a PDF invoice with your own numbering, your logo and brand color, and a payment link rendered as a QR code. Ready-mix tickets, rebar receipts, form lumber, and the pump invoice get photographed on the spot and read on device by Apple Intelligence, which matters because a paper ticket in a truck cab does not survive a wet week. Miles between the plant, the yard, and the lot get logged as you drive them, and the rules behind that log are in IRS mileage log requirements. The ledger is append-only and hash-chained, so what you billed and when stays fixed. The year exports as one file, or as the Accountant Pack — a CSV plus a one-page summary PDF. Free is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription. The habit of keeping every supply ticket attached to its job is the same one described in contractor receipt organizer, and it applies just as hard when the next crew is setting fence posts in a backyard.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate concrete yardage for footings?

Multiply width in feet by depth in feet by length in linear feet, then divide by 27. A 16-inch by 12-inch footing is 1.33 cubic feet per linear foot, so 100 feet takes 4.9 cubic yards. Count pads and piers separately as each: a 24-inch square pad 12 inches deep is 4 cubic feet, or 0.15 cubic yards. Then compare that neat-line figure against the delivery ticket.

Should a footings invoice bill by the yard or by the linear foot?

By the yard for the concrete placed, and by the linear foot for excavation and forming. The two costs do not move together. A deep narrow trench and a shallow wide one can take identical yardage while taking very different hours to dig, form, brace, and tie. Splitting them lets you defend either number on its own, and shows the customer where the labor actually went.

Why is the concrete I placed more than the footing drawing calls for?

Because a trench is not a form. Sandy, wet, or root-filled ground sloughs, a bucket cuts wider than the line, and rain opens the sides further. Placed yardage above the neat-line calculation is normal on footings and abnormal on a formed slab. Show both numbers on the invoice with a one-line reason and photographs, rather than quietly billing the larger figure.

What extra charges from the ready-mix supplier should go on the invoice?

Short-load fees when the order is under your plant’s minimum, wait-time or demurrage once the free unloading window runs out, after-hours and weekend delivery, cold-weather accelerator or hot-weather admixtures, and any pump or conveyor with its minimum-hours charge. Pass them through as named lines with the ticket attached rather than absorbing them into the yard price.

When should a concrete contractor invoice after pouring footings?

The same day, on site, before the forms come off. Your ready-mix bill is already aging and may be cash on delivery, so every unsent day finances the supplier out of your account. Raise the invoice from the phone with the ticket photos attached and a payment QR code on it. On general contractor work, file the pay application ahead of their cutoff instead.

What proof should I keep after footings are backfilled?

Photos with a tape in frame showing trench width, depth from a string line, bar size and spacing, laps, corner bars, and chairs; the inspection approval if one was issued; every ready-mix ticket with yards, psi, and batch time; a top-of-footing elevation shot at the benchmark; and the dated change-order messages. Once there is a wall on it, those files are the only footing that still exists.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.