The tool, in your browser
The authority sheet
One sheet per foreman. Every decision on the job goes in one of three buckets — he decides alone, he decides and tells you, always comes to you — with two real dollar caps written in and one date at the bottom to raise them on. The page checks the thing the spreadsheet can’t: whether the middle bucket is actually alive, or whether the second cap isn’t above the first and you’ve signed a two-bucket sheet wearing three.
Free, and it asks for nothing. No email, no account, no sign-up. What you type stays in this browser on this device.
Read this first
Start the caps low. $500 alone and $2,000 with a text is a normal place to begin with a foreman you’ve just handed the keys to. The number isn’t a judgment on him — it’s where you both start. What makes this sheet work is the date at the bottom: you raise the caps he’s earned on that day, not on a mood, and not the third time he corners you about it.
One man, one sheet. If you run three foremen, the caps are different for each of them and so is the date — fill one in, print it, sign it, then clear the page and do the next.
The sheet fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
How it gets used
- Fill it in with him sitting there, not about him. The lines the sheet already prints are the play’s starting point. Read them out, argue about the ones he thinks are wrong, and add your own for whatever your shop actually fights over.
- Put a number in both caps. A blank cap isn’t “zero and he calls me about everything” and it isn’t a rule either — it’s an unfinished sheet, and the counts here say so until you fill it.
- Make the second cap higher than the first. The middle bucket only exists in the gap between them. Set them equal and there is no repair anywhere that lands in it — the page says so out loud when that happens, which is the one thing the file will happily let you print and sign.
- Set the raise-the-caps date 60 to 90 days out. Type it as a date. Once it’s past, this page counts the days and the sheet says REVIEW DUE — sit down and raise what he’s earned.
- Print it and both sign it. That part matters more than the sheet. An authority sheet nobody signed is a chat, and the two of you will remember it differently in October. Keep his copy in the truck.
- When he blows through a cap, that’s a conversation, not a firing. One that belongs on the strike log if it happens twice — type it across, the way you would between two spreadsheets.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
authority-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — same three buckets, same two caps, same REVIEW DUE flag — for the computer at the shop. Four differences in the page’s favour: it tells you when the middle bucket is dead, which the file will print and let you both sign; a cap with nothing readable in it is called out under the box instead of sitting there as text that grants nothing; you can add as many lines of your own as your shop needs, in any bucket, where the file has one “Other:” row each; and the raise-the-caps date says how many days away it is, where the file only ever says REVIEW DUE or nothing at all. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so it survives a cleared browser and can live in a folder with the rest of that foreman’s paperwork; and it opens on any computer you send it to — including in plain jobsite Spanish, which this page has no version of. Both of them still have to be printed and signed. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M1-05 Put It in Writing: What He Decides Without You — is the conversation itself and how to hold the line when he pushes on a cap, and the sheet notes spell out every bucket, both caps and the one formula.