The Snow Event Ends at 4:10am. By 6:15 the Force Account Sheets Already Tie to the Work Orders.

You tried this in 2024. Somebody sold you an import tool that was supposed to pull the truck hours out of the tracking system and match them to timesheets, and it broke the first time a driver swapped units mid-shift. You went back to the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is still there, and your streets superintendent is still standing over it at 6:15 in the morning with a cup of coffee and 400 rows.

The reason it broke was not the matching. It was the exceptions. Any storm produces two dozen situations no import rule anticipated: a unit down for a hydraulic line, a driver who covered two routes, a contractor plow that ran three hours before anyone wrote a ticket, a salt load taken from the neighboring town's shed under mutual aid. A rules-based import either forces those into the wrong box or dumps the whole file on the floor. Both mean a human re-does it.

6:15am, the way it goes now

The plows come off the routes between three and four-thirty. The paper starts moving at six. Route sheets from twelve trucks, some legible. Timesheets that will not be keyed until Thursday. Salt tickets from the yard scale, some for loads taken at 1am by a driver who did not write a unit number. Truck hours and plow-down time sitting in the tracking system, which nobody has reconciled since November. Fuel card transactions arriving on a two-day delay. And a work order for "snow and ice control" that everything is supposed to tie back to and mostly does not.

Three hours later the superintendent has a number for overtime and a rough sense of tons used. He does not have anything that would survive an audit, and if this storm turns out to be inside a declared disaster window, that gap is expensive in a way nobody feels until closeout eighteen months later.

Where the paperwork actually breaks

Three seams, the same three in every operation.

Labor to work order. Hours get recorded against a cost center rather than an event. When FEMA Public Assistance money is on the table, the Force Account Labor Summary Record has to show who worked, when, on what, at what rate, including fringe — and it has to be reconstructable. Hours attributed to "snow" with no event, no route and no supervisor sign-off are the ones a project specialist writes down.

Equipment to hours. The Force Account Equipment Summary reimburses by unit at the FEMA Schedule of Equipment Rates, and it needs operating hours, not shift hours. A truck sitting at the yard for two hours with the engine running is not the same line as a truck with the plow down. Your tracking system knows the difference; your paper route sheet does not.

Materials to loads. Salt and brine are usually the largest consumable line in a winter event, and the scale tickets, the shed inventory and the spreader controller data almost never agree. When they do not, somebody picks a number, and the number they pick is not defensible.

Add the ordinary business version of the same problem if you are a contractor rather than an agency: unbilled work sitting on the board because nobody assembled the packet, and certified payroll for prevailing wage work due to the awarding agency on a weekly cycle.

What changed in 2026

Two things, and they arrived within six months of each other. Long-running agents can now work unattended for hours instead of returning a single answer — ChatGPT Work, which launched 9 July 2026, accepts a goal, connects to files and applications, runs on its own, and returns a finished spreadsheet or document. Claude Cowork, from 12 January 2026, does the same for staff who are not technical. And Claude Opus 4.6 brought a million-word working memory plus Agent Teams in research preview, meaning several agents can split one job and work different parts of it at the same time.

The practical difference from your 2024 import tool: it does not need every case to fit a rule, because it can read the odd ones the way a clerk would, decide which are genuinely ambiguous, and hand you a short list of exceptions instead of a broken file. The driver who swapped units mid-shift produces one flagged line with both unit numbers attached, not a failed import.

flowchart TD
  A["Plow shift ends 4:10am"] --> E["Overnight run matches the event"]
  B["Truck hours and plow-down time from the tracking system"] --> E
  C["Scale tickets for salt and brine loads"] --> E
  D["Crew hours entered against the storm event"] --> E
  E --> F{"Does every hour tie to a unit, a route and a work order?"}
  F -->|Yes| G["Force account labor and equipment sheets drafted at the FEMA rate"]
  F -->|No| H["Exception queue: 9 items waiting at 6:15am"]
  G --> I["Superintendent signs, packet goes to the finance director"]
  H --> I

The queue that is waiting at 6:15 instead

Same storm, different morning. The superintendent opens a screen with nine items on it, not four hundred rows.

Unit 214 shows 6.2 engine hours and 5.9 plow-down hours but the driver's sheet says eight — the gap is two hours chaining up in the yard, and the superintendent decides which line it belongs on. A salt load at 1:14am has no unit number; the run narrowed it to the two trucks at the shed in that ten-minute window and asks him to pick. A contractor plow ran the industrial park without a ticket; the run found the entry in the tracking system and drafted the ticket for signature. One driver's hours cross the point where the fatigue policy needs a supervisor's approval, and it is flagged as a decision rather than corrected quietly.

Underneath the exceptions, the finished work is already drafted: force account labor by employee with fringe applied, force account equipment by unit at the schedule rate with operating hours rather than shift hours, materials totalled by ticket with the two unmatched tickets called out, and every line pointing back to the work order for the event. Twenty minutes of decisions, then a signature.

What three hours a morning is worth, and the closeout money behind it

Assumptions, illustrative: 18 declared or documented events a winter, three hours of superintendent and administrative time per event on reconciliation, at $58 an hour fully loaded across the two people involved. Storm work of $310,000 a season claimed through Public Assistance, of which an illustrative 7% is normally disallowed or reduced at closeout for documentation gaps.

The labor line is real but modest. The closeout line is where the money is, and it is money you already earned and already spent — it is only at risk because the record was assembled from memory three weeks later. The third line matters most to a contractor: eighteen days earlier on a $310,000 season is a genuine change in what your credit line does in February, which is the month field services companies actually run out of cash.

Four things never to let run unattended

The certified payroll signature. Form WH-347 carries a signed statement of compliance, and a false statement there is a criminal matter, not a bookkeeping error. Let the overnight run assemble it. A named person with authority reads it and signs it.

Overtime approval. Nothing should approve its own overtime. Flag it, sort it, put it in front of the person whose budget it hits.

Disputed hours. When a driver's sheet and the truck's hours disagree, that is a conversation with the driver, not a calculation. Operations that quietly resolve those in software teach their crews that the paperwork is a trap, and you will never get an honest route sheet again.

Anything touching an injury or a damage claim. A mailbox, a parked car, a strained back at the shed — those go to a person the same morning, and the overnight run's only job is to make sure the relevant hours, unit and route are attached to the file before anyone starts asking.

The first step is deliberately small: pick one storm, run the reconciliation the old way and the new way in parallel, and compare the two answers line by line. If the run's exception list is shorter than your spreadsheet's error list, you have your answer without betting a season on it.

Frequently asked questions

Our timesheets are on paper. Does this still work?

Partly, and it is still worth doing. Photographs of route sheets can be read overnight and matched against the tracking system, and the exceptions list will mostly be handwriting the run could not resolve, which is exactly what you want a person deciding. But the honest advice is that paper route sheets are the single biggest tax on this whole process. If you fix one thing before you fix anything else, fix the route sheet.

Will FEMA accept records that were assembled by software?

The requirement has never been about who typed it. It is about whether the record is contemporaneous, complete, and supported — who worked, when, on what, at what rate, on what equipment, for how many operating hours. Records built the same night from the tracking system and the scale are more contemporaneous than a spreadsheet reconstructed three weeks later, and the signature that certifies them still belongs to a person. Keep the underlying source records; do not discard the scale tickets because a summary exists.

Does this need to run overnight, or could it just run at 8am?

Run it overnight, because the point is the morning. A superintendent who walks in to nine decisions is running the day; one who starts a job at 8am and reads the output at 10 has already lost the crew assignment window. The value is not that the computer was awake. It is that the humans start their day at the exception, not at the data entry.

CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer business phone lines and web chat, book appointments and capture leads around the clock. The connection to this post is the phone, not the paperwork: a storm generates a flood of resident calls about plow damage, blocked driveways and missed routes, and those calls arrive during the same hours the office is trying to close out the event. Having them answered and logged properly keeps the morning free for the exceptions that actually need your superintendent.