Make-ready — the utility's work to prepare a pole before you attach — is where pole-attachment budgets actually go wrong. Not the FCC deadlines. The dollars.
Where the money actually leaks
Overruns rarely come from one catastrophic mistake. They come from several smaller ones compounding across a project's poles — and they're only visible if you're tracking estimate vs. invoice at the pole level, not just the project level.
What a real variance table looks like
The fix isn't a bigger contingency line — it's catching the specific line item the moment it's over budget, on the specific pole it happened on.
| Category | Estimated | Invoiced | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering survey | $450 | $450 | $0 |
| Make-ready transfer | $1,200 | $1,850 | +$650 |
| Anchor / guy | $300 | $300 | $0 |
| Pole replacement | $0 | $4,200 | +$4,200 |
| Restoration | $150 | $150 | $0 |
A single pole in a 40-pole application. The $4,200 replacement line — never in the original estimate — is exactly the kind of item that hides inside a project-level total.
What to log, per pole, from day one
- Engineering survey — the utility's inspection/assessment cost
- Make-ready transfer — moving existing attachers to clear space
- Anchor / guy — new or reinforced support hardware
- Pole replacement — when the existing pole can't take the load
- Inspection fee — post-make-ready utility inspection
- Restoration — landscaping, paving, right-of-way repair
- Other — anything that doesn't fit the categories above, logged rather than dropped
The habit that actually works: log the estimate the day it arrives, log every invoice against that same pole as it comes in, and look at variance weekly — not at project close-out. PoleDocket's per-pole ledger does this automatically and rolls it into a "$ make-ready committed" figure across your whole pipeline, so a bad pole surfaces the week it happens, not the quarter you reconcile the books.