Roofing (Dach)
Roofing is the one trade where you also pay for the days nobody works. The scaffolding stands there and keeps charging, rain or no rain.
How it is billed
The roof area goes in square metres, gutters and flashings in running metres, roof windows and vents by the piece, stripping the old covering as a lump sum. Scaffolding is its own item — once for the area, once for how long it stands. Every item has its own unit, so the quote looks the way you count on the roof, not like a spreadsheet from the office. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions roof slope by roof slope, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from.
What gets lost on paper
You do not lose metres or material — you lose DAYS. The scaffolding is hired for two weeks and stands for five, because it rained three times and blew a gale once. Nobody writes that down, because „weather is weather". The scaffolding, though, counts every single day, including the one nobody climbed it. On top of that, bad-weather pay only runs from April to November and covers at most 53 hours a year per worker. Everything above that stays with the firm — quietly, with no invoice and no trace.
Work out what it costs you
Take your scaffolding rate and multiply it by the days your last job overran. Add the daily wages of the people standing around under the roof, and subtract the 53 hours the fund covers. What is left is your money — and not for a mistake, but for rain. Now do it again for the last three roofs. That figure is usually bigger than the program costs in a whole year.
Five minutes a day
In the evening, once you are off the roof: enter your hours and your crew’s, take a photo of the state of the surface, issue the material from stock to this job. The photos stay with the job and are still there in three years, when the customer asks what the boarding looked like before the replacement. That is all. The program does the rest.
What the program watches for you
A service contract for roof inspections turns itself into dates — the program shows what is coming up in the next months and at whose place, and one click turns a date into a job. It also watches the warranty: for work under VOB/B it counts from handover, so you know how long you answer for that roof. And the reverse charge under §13b when you work for another construction firm.
At the end of the year
Everything you entered in the evenings is already counted: revenue, material, scaffolding, your crew’s hours, the kilometres. The annual accounts put themselves together and you look at a finished figure instead of digging receipts out of the cab.
The key is entering your data consistently — a stoppage day noted at once and a photo from the roof count for more than the best program.
