What Is Missing From Your Door Schedule: The 12 Things We Check Before Quoting
, by United Doors and Locks, 5 min reading time
Door schedules are rarely wrong, usually incomplete. The 12-item checklist we run every schedule against, and why each omission fails in a different way.
Door schedules are rarely wrong. They are usually incomplete — and an incomplete schedule fails in a particular way, because the frames, the doors and the hardware are all ordered from the same document. When something is missing from it, everything arrives consistent with each other and wrong at the opening.
Here is the checklist we run every schedule against before we quote it. None of these items are exotic. All of them are things we have had to go back and ask about.
1. Handing on every line
Handing is decided from the outside of the door and written as LH, RH, LHR or RHR. A door prepped for the wrong hand cannot be corrected on site — a mortise lock is handed, and a frame is welded. This is the single most expensive omission on the list because the fix is a new leaf.
2. Jamb depth
Frames get scheduled with a size and a material and no throat dimension. Jamb depth is the measurement that wraps the wall, including finishes, and it is the item that stops an installation dead on delivery day. Common depths are 4-3/4" for a 2x4 stud wall with 1/2" board both sides, and 5-3/4" or 6-3/4" for thicker assemblies. Masonry varies. It needs measuring, not assuming.
3. Fire rating — and whether every component is listed for it
Schedules usually carry the rating. What they often do not carry is confirmation that the specified hardware is listed for that rating. The label certifies the assembly, not the leaf, so a substitution that is stronger but not listed still voids it. This is the omission that fails inspection rather than merely costing time.
4. Backset — on the door and the frame
2-3/8" is residential, 2-3/4" is commercial, and they are 3/8" apart. The version of this mistake we see most is a schedule that has the door prep right and never mentions the frame: a 2-3/4" lock against a 2-3/8"-prepped strike presents the latch 3/8" off the strike opening, and no strike adjustment recovers it.
5. Lock function, not just grade and finish
Grade is how long it lasts. Function is what it actually does. Passage, privacy, entrance/office, storeroom and classroom behave completely differently on doors that look identical, and function is not a field change — a storeroom lock cannot be adjusted into a classroom lock, so a function error means reordering. Storeroom is the most under-specified function in commercial work, and it is usually the right answer for plant rooms, IT closets and stockrooms.
6. Hinge weight and bearing type
Count comes from door height and is easy; weight and bearing come from width, mass and traffic, and get left off. The rule worth writing into the schedule: if the door has a closer, it needs ball bearing hinges. Heavy weight when the leaf is over roughly 200 lb, wider than 36", or on a high-frequency opening. On rated doors the hinges are part of the listing and must be steel.
7. Closer arm type and the ADA opening force
A closer needs a power size and a mounting: regular arm, parallel arm or top jamb. Reverse-bevel doors push the closer to the push side, which rules out regular arm. Then the opening force and closing speed limits have to be met at the same time as the power size — two requirements that pull against each other and need resolving at the desk, not with a screwdriver on site.
8. A stop or holder on every opening that needs one
A closer controls how a door shuts. Nothing in it controls how far it opens. With no stop, the door swings until something arbitrary stops it — often the closer arm at end of travel, which tears out of the door. Note also that no rated door gets a mechanical hold-open; the only compliant hold-open on a rated opening is an electromagnetic device tied to the alarm.
9. Keying, and whether construction keying is needed
Keying is scheduled separately and almost always late. IC-prepped locks ship without permanent cores, so the order is three things — locks, cores, keying instructions — and missing the third means you get the supplier's default. If trades need access before handover, construction keying has to be decided before cylinders are pinned.
10. Finish code, written unambiguously
US26D, 626 and satin chrome are three names for one finish, and mixing conventions across a schedule produces openings that are individually correct and visibly mismatched. Pick BHMA or US codes and stay in one system for the whole document.
11. Thresholds, gasketing and weatherseal
These live at the bottom of a hardware set and are the first things to fall off it. Exterior openings, acoustic separations and rated assemblies all depend on them, and a rated opening has clearance tolerances that the gasketing is part of meeting.
12. Electrified openings: power, sequence and who provides what
An electrified opening on a schedule usually says what the lock is and nothing about how it behaves. It needs a sequence of operations — what happens on valid credential, on power loss, on fire alarm — plus a decision on fail safe versus fail secure, and an explicit note on who provides the power supply, the relay and the door position switch. Egress never changes: the inside always releases in one motion, without power.
The pattern behind all twelve
Every item on this list is a coordination gap rather than a technical difficulty. They are missed because the schedule is assembled from several documents by several people, and the information that falls between those documents is the information that ends up missing. Reading the hardware schedule against the door schedule and the Division 8 specification before the submittal goes out catches nearly all of it.
Doing that read costs an afternoon. Not doing it costs a change order, a re-inspection, or a leaf.
Send us the schedule
Send the door schedule, the architectural drawings and the Division 8 specification and we will run this checklist against every opening and tell you what is missing before anything is ordered.
Email estimates@uniteddoorsandlocks.com or call 346-777-3031.