CONTRACTOR GLOSSARY · MATERIALS & PURCHASING
What is a Counter ticket?
A counter ticket is the itemized slip the supply house prints when you buy at the counter — line by line, what left the store, on which job account, at what price.
Walk into the supply house, the counter pulls your material, and out comes the ticket: items, quantities, prices, and — if you told them — the job the purchase belongs to. That slip is the birth certificate of the material cost. Everything downstream (the invoice, the statement line, the job cost, the markup you bill) traces back to it.
It's also the leakiest piece of paper in the trade. Counter tickets ride the dashboard, live in a shirt pocket, and go through the wash. When one disappears, the purchase still shows up on the monthly statement — but with nobody left who remembers which job it was for, it gets eaten as overhead instead of billed with markup. Snap the ticket before it hits the dashboard floor; a same-day photo is all the discipline it takes.
The other half of the habit happens before the ticket prints: tell the counter which job account to ring it on. A ticket with the job name on its face files itself; a ticket without one is a memory test three weeks later.
Common questions
Is a counter ticket the same as an invoice?
Usually not. The ticket records the counter transaction; the supply house generates an invoice from it, and both roll up on the monthly statement. Being able to match all three is what catches errors and missing job tags.
What should you do with a counter ticket?
Get it tagged to a job account before it prints, then capture it the same day — a phone photo beats a glovebox. A ticket that reaches the office still readable and still job-tagged is a billed material; one that doesn't is overhead.
RevnuPros tracks the thing, not just the word
Permits to sign-off, T&M tags to signature, materials to billed through, retainage to released — built for subcontractors. Browse the full contractor glossary or the Massachusetts permit guide.
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