Priced the way Roofing work is billed
A roof inspection and a flashing repair don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Roofing the way the work is really billed: per square — 100 square feet — at about $500 a square, with tear-off and underlayment as per-square add-ons. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Roofing jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Roofing work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Full roof replacement, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $4,750 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Roofing price
Two Roofing jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Pitch and stories — a steep two-story roof is slower and riskier, and it prices well above a walkable ranch.
- Tear-off and layers — stripping two layers of old shingle is a per-square add-on, never something that's just included.
- Decking and flashing — rotten decking you find mid-job is change-order territory, so note it before you cover it up.
What a Roofing job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Roofing is no exception. SideWRK captures the number of squares and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the number of squares
- how many existing layers are up there (two is usually the limit)
- the roof type
- an insurance-funded flag
- deductible-fraud and not-a-public-adjuster disclosures
Example note on a job: "Repair only — advised full replacement recommended within ~2 yrs."
How to price a Roofing job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Roofing job and tap a suggestion like "Roof inspection" or "Shingle repair" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per square
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per square — 100 square feet — at about $500 a square, with tear-off and underlayment as per-square add-ons. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Roofing ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Repair only — advised full replacement recommended within ~2 yrs." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Roofing-specific records: the number of squares, and how many existing layers are up there (two is usually the limit).
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Roofing estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Roofing work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a roofing or contractor license and a permit — and on an insurance job, you can't waive or eat the deductible (that's fraud), and you're not the customer's public adjuster. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Roofing pricing — common questions
How do I price a Roofing job in SideWRK?
You bill per square — 100 square feet — at about $500 a square, with tear-off and underlayment as per-square add-ons. Add the work — Roof inspection, Shingle repair, Full roof replacement — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Roofing job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like full roof replacement runs about $9,500 in the app — roughly $4,750 of that is your labor and about $4,750 is parts at your cost. Common Roofing work ranges from about $150 to $9,500. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Roofing job?
The records Roofing work actually needs: the number of squares; how many existing layers are up there (two is usually the limit); the roof type. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Roofing work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a roofing or contractor license and a permit — and on an insurance job, you can't waive or eat the deductible (that's fraud), and you're not the customer's public adjuster. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you, and it flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Roofing?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
The six prices up top settle what to charge. Day zero is the harder problem, and it isn't price: a homeowner is deciding whether to hand five figures to a name they've never heard, for work they will never climb up and check. Nobody wins that with a lower bid. What actually moves it:
- The way in is the small end of the board. The $150 inspection, the $380 flashing repair, the $600 leak call — open a roofing job and all six of the titles priced up top sit as chips under the title box, so naming the work is a tap instead of typing. The money goes on the line below it, where roofing gets a priced menu of its own: seven buttons with the rate printed on each one. What each of those small tickets ought to be worth, and the argument about repair pricing that most of this trade has backwards, is how to price roofing jobs for profit. Read it before you quote one.
- Look the part on paper — it's the only part of the job they can inspect. The estimate goes out with your business name, your logo, your roofing or contractor license number, and every line itemized — squares, tear-off, disposal, each priced on its own row. The homeowner approves it by typing their name on their phone, and that name lands on the document with the date beside it. Against a number written on the back of a business card, that is most of the decision, and it costs you one evening setting the profile up.
- Have a floor before you need one. The driveway conversation where somebody else came in cheaper is not the moment to work out whether your number survives payroll, the dump run, and thirty days of waiting to collect. The pricing guide builds that floor from the bottom up — the cost stack, what a crew hour really costs, margin versus markup, a complete bid worked to its last line. An hour with it is the difference between holding your number and talking yourself out of it standing up.
Repeat business — the street, not the customer
Most trades on this site sell the same customer something again next season. Roofing doesn't. You hand somebody a roof and they're done buying roofs for fifteen or twenty years. So the repeat customer in this trade is the address next door, and the long tail on the one you already did:
- Your work sits on the outside of the house, where the whole street can grade it. A panel upgrade or a water heater disappears the day it's finished. A roof doesn't, and the review-and-referral side of this trade has a deep-dive of its own: how roofers win 5-star reviews and referrals covers what a single review is worth when the ticket is a whole roof, when to ask for it, how one finished job works the addresses around it, and how to answer the one that lands under five stars. What the app adds is the backstop — after a job wraps it emails the review request on its own, once, with a single reminder a few days later, for the roofs where the ask got away from you.
- The roof you replaced is a twenty-year record, not a closed job. Gutters still fill. Storms still come through. A roof under warranty still wants looking at. The property record holds the roof type, the squares, the layer count, and the year, so the fall inspection call is a quote you read instead of a memory you reconstruct — and it comes from the person who put the roof on, not a stranger with a ladder.
- Put the standing visits on a plan. The gutter clean and the pre-winter inspection are the two jobs on the roofing list that actually repeat, and they're worth setting up as a recurring plan — the work, the price, the cadence. Each cycle spawns a pre-filled job sitting in your list ready to schedule, so the slow stretch between replacements has something in it.
- One message, one house, from your own phone. When you do reach out, write it to the address: what you found last October, how the roof came through the season. That reads like somebody who remembers their house. A blast reads like a blast — and the job record is right there, so the message mostly writes itself.
How roofing work bills
The unit is the square — 100 square feet — and in the app it's literally the box you type in. Open a roofing line and the quantity field reads Squares (100 sq ft) and the rate field reads Rate ($/square), with 22 sitting in the quantity box as the example. A new roofing account gets set up at $500 a square, saved as your default in Shop and editable on any line. Every roofing line multiplies out from those two numbers.
The tap menu on the estimate form is where the add-ons live, and five of the seven are priced per square — which is the part that costs money when it gets typed in as a flat dollar amount:
The app's starting rates, every one of them editable on the line. Tap it, put the squares in, and it multiplies.
Which brings up the one number to settle before any of this goes out: what kind of $500 yours is. The $9,500 full replacement up the page is a whole-job starting price for a standard 19-square roof — labor and materials both, as the breakdown up top splits it — not a total the app assembles out of the menu. The menu is built as adders, so the $500 the app hands you behaves as an install rate with everything above it priced on its own line. The published benchmark runs the other way: the pricing guide holds $500 a square as the all-in installed number and builds up to it from cost. Same figure, two conventions, and only one of them can be the rate in your Shop. Pick it deliberately instead of leaving the default sitting there and stacking adders on top of it. Leave it at $500 as an install rate and the arithmetic runs like this:
The tear-off line is the one that bleeds. $100 is a rate, not a price — put 22 in the squares box and it comes out $2,200. Typed as a flat hundred-dollar line, the same estimate goes out at $11,550. The dumpster is its own row and still gets billed either way — what the $2,100 buys is the stripping itself, a crew pulling twenty-two squares of old shingle off a roof and into it, most of a day of it.
The layer count has a field of its own, and it earns one. The property record carries Existing layers — 1, 2, or 3+ — and a two puts the extra-layer tear-off line on the estimate at $50 a square: $1,100 on this roof, closing it at $14,750. Steep pitch works the same way, its own per-square line at $75, never something you swallow inside the base rate. The count lives on the property, so it is there on bid day rather than on tear-off day.
All of it multiplies against the squares, so that first number had better be right. Inside a roofing job, Build it with the takeoff calculator opens the roof takeoff with the satellite trace built into it and your labor rate carried across, then drops the priced lines onto the estimate — and the materials list doubles as the shopping list for the supply house.
Multiplying jobs
A five-figure estimate doesn't get answered the day you send it. It gets read at a kitchen table, held up against two other numbers, and sat on. Most of what follows is the app doing the chasing you'd otherwise be doing from a ladder:
- You get told the moment they open it. When the customer loads the estimate, the app pushes and emails you — once per job every six hours at most, and never on one already approved or declined. On a roof decision that's the call worth making while the number is still up on their screen.
- The quiet estimate chases itself. An estimate nobody answered gets a plain follow-up email at 3 days and again at 7, two at most. The homeowner who meant to say yes usually just lost the thread under forty other emails. It's a toggle you own.
- The extras ride the approval, not a sales pitch. Mark a line optional and the customer takes it or leaves it when they approve — ridge vent, gutter guards, the dormer flashing you'd rather do while the staging is up. Ticked, it's on the invoice. Skipped, nobody had to have the conversation.
- The balance chases itself, then stops. An invoice still owed after the work wraps sends reminders at 3, 7, and 14 days with a pay link on them — three in total, never a fourth, and only while you leave the switch on. Or send a payment request and it goes customer-to-you, into an app you already use. How much to hold back against the shingle order before you start is a pricing call, not an app one.
- The before-and-after does the arguing. Curled and patched, then a clean field of new shingle — paired out of the job's own photos into the gallery on your public page. Your finished work lives forty feet up where nobody gets a close look at it, so that photo is as near as a stranger comes to standing on it.
- Truck stock that counts down. The app's roofing list is already real — roofing nail coils, shingle bundles, roofing cement, pipe boots, roof sealant, synthetic underlayment — each one a chip that opens the inventory form named, with a sane reorder point already in the box; you put in the count and what you paid. Burn the last roll of underlayment on a Tuesday and it says so before you promise a Thursday.
All of it is running on a sample roofing business in the live roofing demo — free, no signup.
Price it now
Footprint, pitch, shingle, complexity, layers to strip, and your own labor rate — a number in hand before you're up there guessing at one. One box to read carefully on the way in: the rate here is labor only — the calculator prices shingles and tear-off itself, underneath it — so the $500 from your Shop is the wrong number to type in there. Put your labor per square in and let it count the materials once. The same free calculator the roofing page runs, right here:
Want the full-page version to bookmark or send to somebody? It lives at the roofing cost calculator.
The paper worth keeping
The records list above names what the app captures on a roofing job. This is why each line earns its place:
- The roof, on the record. The job label and address, the roof type — asphalt shingle, metal, tile, flat or TPO, wood shake, slate — the year built, the squares, the existing layer count, and whether the job is insurance-funded. The notes line takes the rest: tear-off, layers, pitch, access. That record is the estimate, the reminder, and the answer when a neighbor calls next spring and you'd otherwise be rebuilding a roof from memory.
- The layer count, and what it means. Asphalt roofs are generally limited to two layers — a third means a full tear-off — and installing over deteriorated decking or outside the manufacturer's specification can void the material warranty. That notice prints on the estimate and the invoice in plain language, so the count you recorded and the rule that governs it end up on the same piece of paper.
- Insurance-funded work: the rules, printed on the paperwork. The property record carries an insurance flag — No, or Yes, insurance claim — so the job's own file says which kind it was. The rules themselves print on every roofing estimate and invoice, insurance job or not. First: in many states a contractor may not pay, waive, rebate, or absorb any part of a homeowner's insurance deductible — doing so can be insurance fraud, and the homeowner is responsible for their full deductible. Second: a roofing contractor is not a licensed public adjuster and cannot interpret the policy, advise on coverage, or negotiate the claim; that belongs to the homeowner and their insurer. SideWRK puts those rules on your document, worded the same way every time. What it does not do is write your contract, and it tells you so at the moment it matters: flag the property insurance-funded and the job itself says that insurance-funded roofing needs specific notices in your contract, that SideWRK doesn't provide them, and to use your own. It doesn't tell you how to handle a claim, an adjuster, or a deductible either — and neither does this page.
- The license and the permit. A re-roof typically needs a permit and an inspection, and roofing work generally sits behind a roofing or contractor license. The app holds your license number once and prints it on every estimate and invoice, keeps the permit number and its inspection status on the job, and puts the permit fee on the ticket as its own line instead of burying it in labor. One more rides the same paperwork: on a home built before 1978, federal EPA RRP rules may require lead-safe work practices, firm certification, and the owner's copy of the "Renovate Right" pamphlet before paint gets disturbed. Confirming what applies where you work stays yours.
- Tax season, pre-assembled. Numbered invoices, payments, and material receipts roll up in Know your numbers into category totals, CSVs, and a printable year-end summary a preparer can use without calling you.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice — it helps you keep the records; the rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.