What Goes on a Traffic Control Daily Ticket: The Fields GCs and DOTs Ask For

A daily ticket is the page that turns a shift into money. When the general contractor's project manager reviews your invoice, the ticket is what they hold it against. When the prime's office or an agency inspector asks what was set up on a given night, the ticket is the record. And when anyone disagrees, the ticket is the only document in the conversation that was written while the work was happening.

There is no single national form. Agencies, primes and contracts differ, and some will hand you their own form and expect you to use it. What follows is the set of fields that answers the questions reviewers ask most often, with the reason each field is there. Treat it as a starting point, then add whatever your contracts name. If you want it on paper, we publish a free printable daily ticket template with these fields.

Start from how you get paid

Before you design the form, read the pay items. On federal-aid highway work, FHWA's rule on temporary traffic control, 23 CFR 630.1108(f), calls for traffic control to be paid through its own pay items instead of being folded into other work. For method-based specifications it allows unit price, lump sum or a mix of the two, and it calls for the specifications to explain how placing, moving and maintaining devices will be paid. States carry that into their own specifications, and primes carry it into their subcontracts.

The practical point for a ticket is simple: count what the contract pays for, in the unit the contract uses. If your subcontract pays a lane closure per shift and a flagger per hour, a ticket that says "LC crew, all day" leaves the reviewer to guess, and a guessing reviewer rounds down. Design the form so the crew fills in exactly the quantities the pay items name, and nothing has to be translated in the office.

The header: who, where, when, and under which order

Ticket number and date. One ticket per job per day keeps the count simple and makes a missing day obvious. The number lets everyone refer to the same page.

Customer, contractor and prime. Who you are working for, and who they are working for. On subcontract work the company that pays you is often not the company on the project sign. Getting both names on the ticket saves a phone call when the invoice reaches the wrong office.

Customer PO or work order number. Accounts payable matches invoices to purchase orders. An invoice that arrives without the PO number tends to wait until someone finds it.

Region, county and state. Location at the level the paperwork cares about. These can decide which tax rate applies to the invoice and which district office reviews the work, and they let you sort tickets by area later.

Start and stop times. The time the crew started and the time it stopped, written when each happened. Shift minimums, overtime and standby charges all start from these two times. Rounded or estimated times are the most common seed of a dispute; our post on preventing daily ticket disputes goes through why.

Notes. Delays, changes from the plan, who asked for what and when. Short and factual. "Held 07:10 to 09:30, paving crew not ready, per site superintendent" is a note that gets paid. "Waited a while" is not.

Billing rows: resources, units and rates

The middle of the ticket lists what you are billing for. On a typical lane closure that means four kinds of resource:

• Lane closure (LC): the setup itself, usually counted per closure per shift.
• Flagging (FL): flaggers, counted per person per shift or per hour.
• Truck-mounted attenuator (TMA): the protection truck and its operator.
• Queue trucks: trucks posted upstream to warn drivers approaching the back of a stopped line of traffic.

Each row needs a unit count, and the unit has to match your rate sheet. If a TMA is priced per shift, the ticket counts shifts, not hours. Write a zero rather than leaving a row blank, so nobody can wonder whether a resource was forgotten.

Whether the rate itself appears on the ticket is a choice. Showing it means the signer confirms the money at the site, and invoicing becomes arithmetic. Leaving it off suits customers whose field staff should not see prices. Pick one approach per customer and stick to it. Our post on billing lane closures, flaggers, TMAs and queue trucks covers how each resource is usually priced.

Lane events: which closure, exactly

A job can run more than one closure in a day: the right lane northbound in the morning, the shoulder southbound after lunch. Each closure deserves its own row with:

• the number of lanes closed,
• the route and the road name,
• the direction of travel,
• the starting and ending mile markers,
• who was working inside the closure, and
• the type of work they were doing.

Why this much detail? Because the customer's pay application is often split by location or phase, and a line that says "I-35" does not tell the reviewer which phase to charge. Direction matters because a northbound setup and a southbound setup are two different setups. Mile markers matter because they are the only location reference that the crew, the prime and the agency all read the same way. And when something goes wrong in a work zone, the first question is where; a ticket that already answers it is worth more than a ticket that needs a phone call.

Trucks and crew times

List each truck with its number, what it was used for (lane closure, flagging, TMA or queue), the employee driving it, and its start and stop times. Three reasons:

1. It cross-checks the billing rows. A TMA billed for a full shift should have a truck with an operator on the ticket for that shift.
2. It cross-checks payroll. Truck times and timesheet punches should tell the same story. When they do not, you find out before the customer does.
3. It feeds labor reporting. On prevailing wage work, who did what and for how long is exactly what certified payroll asks for.

The signature block

The signature is what turns a field note into an accepted record. Capture four things with it: the signer's printed name, their role, the time, and where it was signed.

On form, the federal E-SIGN Act, at 15 U.S.C. 7001(a), provides that a signature or record relating to a transaction in interstate commerce may not be denied legal effect solely because it is in electronic form. That settles whether a signature on a tablet counts as a signature. It does not settle whether it proves anything. What makes it useful later is everything around it: a named person with a role, signing at the job site at the end of the shift, on a copy that cannot be changed afterward. Our post on electronic signatures on daily tickets covers this in more depth.

If a ticket needs a change after it is signed, do not edit the signed copy quietly. Get a new signature, or attach a written note that says what changed and who agreed.

Keep the ticket with the invoice

The ticket is the support for the invoice. The IRS's guidance on what kind of records to keep lists invoices among the supporting documents that back the entries in your books, and says those documents should be kept in an orderly way. A signed ticket filed next to the invoice it produced answers the next question before anyone asks it.

The gaps that cause most of the trouble

• Blank fields. A blank reads as careless and weakens the parts that are filled in.
• Rounded times. "7:00" written at 4 p.m. is an estimate, and the other side's records will say so.
• One row for two closures. The reviewer cannot split it, so they question all of it.
• A signature with no name. An initial nobody can identify is close to no signature.
• Changes after signing. Any edit after the signature should carry its own approval.

How Traffic OS handles the daily ticket

Traffic OS keeps one ticket per job per day. The header holds the contractor, prime, customer PO, region, county, state, AM start, PM stop and notes. Billing rows hold units and a rate for lane closure (LC), flagging (FL), truck-mounted attenuator (TMA) and queue trucks. Lane events record lanes, route, direction, road, mile-marker range and type of work, and the trucks section records each truck with its employee and start and stop times.

The customer signs on the phone or tablet. Traffic OS stores the signer's name, the time and the GPS position, and freezes the signed PDF so later edits cannot change what was signed. The office then turns one signed ticket into one draft invoice in one click, with one line per billing row, and can add lines to that draft by hand before sending it.

Traffic OS records what your crew enters. It does not decide which fields your agency or prime requires; that is still a question for your contract. See the daily ticket features for the screens, or start with the printable template if you are still on paper.