A signature closes your retail job. On a storm file it’s stage 4 of 19.
Retail runs ~7–21 days and ends when the homeowner pays you. An insurance file runs ~45–90 days and ends when a carrier releases the second check and the deductible is collected — and almost every date in between belongs to an adjuster, a mortgage company or a deadline nobody in your office set.
Most roofing software gives you one pipeline and calls the storm lane a stage. Your account opens with both boards, named the way this trade actually names them, and with the follow-up pointed at the people who owe you the next move.
Three gates on one file. A carrier owns the first, a lender owns the second, and the third has an expiry date on it.
Same crew, same truck, two completely different businesses.
Force retail and storm work through one stage set and your board fills up with signed jobs that will never produce. Retail closes on the signature. The insurance file is barely started at the signature — and the fifteen stages after it are where the money either arrives or quietly doesn’t. Here are both boards, running.
Twelve stages, ~7–21 days. The signature is stage six, and everything after it is work your own company controls.
- New Lead
- Contacted
- Inspection Scheduled
- Inspected & Measured
- Proposal Presented
- Signed + Depositthe signature
- Pre-Production
- Scheduled
- In Production
- Punch List / Final Walkthrough
- Final Payment
- Warranty Registered / Closed
Six stages left after the signature. The one gate that isn’t yours is Pre-Production — a permit office, sometimes a homeowners association, and a supplier’s written delivery date.
Nineteen stages, ~45–90 days. The signature is stage four. Eight of the remaining fifteen wait on somebody outside your company.
- Storm Lead
- Free Inspection
- Damage Found
- Contingency Agreement Signedthe signature
- Claim Filed by Homeowner
- Adjuster Meeting Scheduled
- Adjuster Meeting Held
- Scope Received
- Approved / Partial / Denied
- Supplement Filed
- Supplement Approved
- ACV Check Received
- Mortgage Endorsement In Process
- Funds Available
- In Production
- Certificate of Completion + Final Invoice
- Depreciation Released (2nd check)
- Deductible Collected
- Closed / Warranty Registered
Fifteen stages left after the signature — and four separate money events, two of which land after the roof is already on.
Illustrative example — the day counts are typical published cycle lengths, not a projection. The stage names are not. Those are the two boards your account actually opens with, in order, spelled exactly the way they appear in the build. Nobody selling a roofing snapshot publishes theirs; we went looking.
There are two checks. Everybody remembers the first one.
The first check funds the work and lands before you start. The second one — the recoverable depreciation the carrier held back — releases only when proof of completion is submitted, on a policy clock that starts running the day the roof is finished. On a full replacement that holdback is routinely the difference between a good job and a break-even one, and it is invisible on a board that treats “installed” as done.
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Day 0
Completion, then paperwork
The certificate of completion and the final invoice go to the carrier the day the walkthrough closes, because that document is what starts the release — not the week somebody remembers to send it.
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Day 14
First chase
Nothing back yet is normal. The task fires anyway, on the file, with the claim number and the submitted date attached so whoever picks up the phone isn’t starting from nothing.
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Day 30
Second chase, owner copied
The escalation exists because this is the point where a busy office stops following a file it already installed. The tag stays on the record until the balance is released.
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Day 150
Hard alarm
Thirty days before the earliest forfeiture point your account is configured for, an open recoverable-depreciation balance stops being a reminder and becomes an alarm on the owner’s desk.
Illustrative example. The chase days and the 180-day forfeiture point are parameters your account ships with and you can change; published windows run ~180 days to two years and the actual terms belong to the homeowner’s policy, not to us. Recoverable Depreciation, Depreciation Release Due and Depreciation Released are real fields on the file, and an unreleased balance is a tag that suppresses other things — starting with the review request.
What the file refuses to do while that balance is open
A homeowner still waiting on money is not a review moment, and a referral ask lands as a request for a favor from someone who thinks you owe them one. Roofing’s suppression rules are stricter than any other trade we have built for.
- No review request while a supplement is still open
- No review request while recoverable depreciation is unreleased
- No review request while the deductible is uncollected
- No referral ask until the file is genuinely closed on both checks
The carrier picks the time. Usually tomorrow.
Every booking calendar ever built assumes you offer availability and somebody picks a slot. The adjuster meeting inverts that completely: the carrier assigns the adjuster, the adjuster picks the time, and it commonly lands on ~24–48 hours’ notice inside a ~7–14 day window — longer only when the whole region is a declared catastrophe. There is no reschedule link to send.
How the block actually works
A hard block with a name on it, not an open slot- Carrier assigns
- Entered as a hard block
- Rep assigned
- Confirm chain fires
- Unassigned 24h out → owner alerted
- Adjuster Meeting Held
Your rep’s job at that meeting is to be on the roof with the documentation: the photo set organized by slope, the test-square counts, the shingle product identified, the code items the property actually has. The system assembles and tracks that evidence. It does not write the claim, file the claim, or speak to a carrier on anyone’s behalf — and it cannot be made to.
And the other appointment you don’t control: the weather
Rain is not an exception in this trade, it is a routine input — and a bad Tuesday cascades through every crew day behind it. Published estimates put weather delay at ~45% of construction projects annually, and roofing takes more of it than most. The failure isn’t the rain. It’s the four homeowners who find out by watching the driveway stay empty.
- One weather call re-notifies every affected homeowner down the line, in order, the same day, with a new date
- Build Day is a crew block sized against the square count, not a customer appointment slot
- The municipal deck inspection sits mid-install — tear-off done, dry-in waiting — so it is a stop-work gate, not a reminder
- Crews that lose a week to weather leave; the catch-up days come out of the schedule on purpose, which is a board decision before it is a payroll one
We didn’t guess at your business.
Four things about roofing that a general-purpose CRM has no place to put — which is why they end up in somebody’s head, and why that is where they get missed.
The carrier is a second customer.
Painting has one buyer. A storm roof has three parties who each have to say yes: the homeowner signs, the carrier approves the scope and releases the money in two tranches, and wherever there’s a mortgage the lender endorses the check and often escrows it against inspected progress. Model only the homeowner and you have modeled about a third of the job.
Storm week is a volume event, not a campaign.
Hail lands on a Tuesday and by Friday the phone has rung more than in the previous quarter, inside a window that is days long, not weeks — before the homeowner signs with whoever knocked first. The office cannot answer that volume; that is not a staffing failure, it is arithmetic. Text-back in seconds is the single highest-yield thing running during an event, and after-hours coverage matters more that week than at any other point in the year.
A proposal is presented, not emailed — and then it expires.
The highest-probability window is the 24–72 hours after the estimate, and a PDF landing in an inbox with no human attached dies inside it. Then the second deadline arrives: quotes in this trade now run ~30 days because asphalt is petroleum linked. A warning fires at day 25 and the proposal flips to requiring a re-quote at day 31, so nobody honors last quarter’s material cost by accident.
Never promise an install date you don’t have material for.
The rule operators repeat is blunt: no date until you hold a firm written delivery date, then add a buffer before tear-off. Production scheduling doesn’t open on this board until the permit is pulled, the homeowners association has signed off where that’s flagged, the color is selected and the material is ordered with a date in writing. A job that gets a date before material becomes a rescheduled, angry customer and a crew standing in a driveway.
A third board, because a repair is not a small roof.
Small tickets, but this is the only lane that gives you a reason to contact a past customer at all. A roof bought this year isn’t rebought for twenty to thirty years — so repair, the annual inspection and the next storm over the same addresses are the entire reactivation story.
Roofing — Repair / Maintenance
Days — the lane that keeps the database alive- Repair Request
- Scheduled
- Completed
- Invoiced
- Paid
- Reactivation Watch
Where a storm lead goes when there’s no damage
Not a dead lead — a dated one- Inspected, nothing claimable found
- Tagged to the storm cohort at the property
- Converted to a retail repair quote same day
- Held on the address list
- Re-approached on the next qualifying event
- Back on a board with its history intact
Why the cohort tag sits on the property, not the person
A hail event is a geography, not a customer list. Stamping the event at the address is what lets you re-canvass a street, compare how one carrier handled thirty files from the same storm, resurrect the no-damage inspections when the next cell comes through, and size a crew board against real demand instead of a hunch.
- The neighbors of a finished job took the same hail — that street is the highest-intent list you own, and the roof itself is the yard sign
- Files carry the carrier they belong to, because carriers behave differently and an operator who can’t segment by carrier can’t learn the pattern
- Canvassers log an address first and a name second, which is the order the door actually happens in
Four calendars, and only two of them are yours to offer.
Merge them and a crew day gets booked over an inspection nobody can move. These are the calendars your account opens with, by name.
Yours to offer, and it should produce everything in one visit: the photo set by slope, the test squares, and the aerial measurement ordered before the ladder comes off the truck. Confirm, remind, on-my-way.
Not an availability calendar at all. A hard block with a mandatory rep assignment, an escalating confirmation chain, and an owner alert if it is still unassigned 24 hours out.
A crew-day block sized against the square count rather than a customer slot, and it only releases once material, permit, homeowners-association sign-off, crew and homeowner confirmation are all actually true.
Punch list, magnet sweep, photo log and warranty handoff — and the moment the certificate of completion generates, which is what starts the second check moving.
The follow-up you keep meaning to build.
Every one of these ships switched on and named for roofing. None of them is a template you have to find, wire up and remember to turn on — and several of them exist mainly to know when not to send.
Four intakes, because the first sentence differs
A door-knock or canvass lead, a web or Google Business Profile lead, a referral, and an emergency leak are four different openings. The canvass one is address-first and stamps the storm cohort on entry. The referral one names the referrer and drops the generic offer. The leak one skips nurture entirely and routes to dispatch.
Missed-call text-back, sized for a storm week
The message goes out in seconds, and outside your hours it says so and holds the thread. During an event this is the workflow doing the most work in the whole account, because the call volume is designed to exceed the office.
Inspection confirmations, reminders and no-show recovery
The lead who books an inspection and then quietly cancels is the commonest way a retail job dies, because there is usually no reschedule chase behind it. Here there is one, and it is a different sequence from the one that chases a proposal.
The adjuster-meeting rep alert
The slot lands with almost no notice, so the re-task and the confirmation fire immediately, and the owner gets told if nobody has confirmed 24 hours out. This is the one appointment in the vertical with no second chance.
The weather reschedule cascade
One call from the owner re-notifies every affected homeowner down the line, in order, the same day, each with a new date. A silent slip is what produces the review that costs more than the rain did.
Proposal follow-up: five touches in seven days, then the long tail
Front-loaded into the 24–72 hour window, with the photo set of their roof doing the work rather than generic proof, then two more touches across the following month. The sequence supports the presentation; it does not replace it.
Quote expiry and the re-quote flip
A warning at day 25 and an automatic flip to requiring a re-quote at day 31, so an aged proposal never gets honored at last quarter’s material price by default.
The pre-production gate
Permit pulled, homeowners association cleared where the file says it’s required, color selected, material ordered with a firm written delivery date. Until all four are true the scheduling stage doesn’t open. It is a gate, not a checklist somebody can wave through.
A waiting cadence aimed at the third party
Permit and homeowners-association waits get their own state: the office is nudged about the office that owes you something, and the customer gets a status note rather than a sales drip. A chirpy nurture text firing while a permit is pending reads as incompetence.
The depreciation chase and the deductible collection
Two separate collection workflows with two separate deadlines, both running after the roof is on and the crew has moved to the next street. This is the pair the market does not ship — we checked, and the published best-in-class list for roofing snapshots mentions deposits and never once mentions depreciation.
Warranty registration with a real deadline
Premium manufacturer warranties are certification-restricted and time-boxed — one major program requires registration within 45 days of installation. Completion opens the task with that due date and escalates before it lands. If your account is not marked as certified, the prompt never fires, because you must not be nudged to register something you cannot issue.
The review request, gated hard
Fired on the final walkthrough or final payment, same day, with a direct link, and negative sentiment routed to the owner first. But suppressed entirely while a supplement is open, a depreciation balance is unreleased or a deductible is uncollected.
Storm cohort reactivation
The no-damage inspections from the last event come back on the next one, with their address, their photos and their history already on file. Plus the street cohort: after a job closes, the neighboring addresses that took the same hail.
Photos aren’t a gallery. They’re a record, organized by slope.
A supplement is not a boolean on a job and a photo roll is not a file. This is the part of the trade where the record either exists in a usable form or it doesn’t — and it is also the part with a bright line around it, which we drew on purpose.
The convention is a 10 ft by 10 ft square chalked in the worst area of each slope with the functional impacts counted inside it. A common carrier threshold is eight impacts in that square; some use six, some ten, and the method’s variance is well documented in the trade press. Bruised mat gets logged separately from cosmetic granule loss, with the shingle product identified. Your file records what was counted, where, and by whom.
Requested, under review, pending re-inspection, more information needed from the rep, approved, completed — and a file can carry several open at different statuses at once. Follow-up at 7, 14 and 21 days after submission. Supplement Status, Supplement Format and Supplement Amount are fields on the opportunity, so the board can tell you which files are actually waiting on a carrier.
Which means a supplement frequently opens after production has started. The board is built for that: a file stays open past install, the supplement carries its own status, and nothing downstream — not the review request, not the referral ask — fires while it is open.
This system records claim paperwork, adjuster meeting dates and supplement status, and it reminds your people to do their jobs. It does not file a claim, write a supplement, argue a scope, or communicate with a carrier for anybody — and it is built so it cannot generate copy that does. That is our own conservative design choice, stated as ours rather than as a reading of your state’s licensing law.
Three things the system is built to be incapable of.
These ship switched on, they market nothing, and they exist because the cost of getting them wrong in this trade is not a lost lead.
Discounting a homeowner’s insurance deductible is a criminal offense in Texas under a statute effective September 2019, carrying a fine and possible jail time. Other states regulate it differently and your own state’s rule is verified with you at setup rather than assumed here. Deductible Collected is its own gated field on the file, an uncollected one is a tag that suppresses the review request, and no message or document the system can generate is capable of reducing it.
Claim number, carrier, date of loss, adjuster, scope status and supplement status are all fields, and the workflows move on them. What the system will not do is produce claim-filing, claim-argument or claim-advocacy language of any kind, on any channel, for anybody. Your copy is reviewed against that rail before your account goes live.
The premium manufacturer warranties are restricted to certified contractors — the top program covers a small single-digit percentage of contractors nationally — and they carry a hard registration deadline. Your certification level is a field, and every piece of copy that mentions a premium warranty is gated on it, so an uncertified account never promises one.
Opt-outs, do-not-contact and suppression are wired before anything else sends, and they outrank every sequence in the account including the storm ones. Text-message and email sending also require real registration in your business’s name, which we prepare and you sign.
Two lanes, two clocks, two checks.
Not close rate. The thing that decides a roofing year is whether the long lane finishes — whether the files you already sold actually complete, collect twice, and close.
Stages on the storm-claim board your account opens with, against twelve on retail. The signature is stage four of the nineteen. These are build values, not estimates.
Typical published full-cycle length for a storm claim, against ~7–21 days for a retail job. Forcing both through one stage set is the structural error this build exists to avoid.
The forfeiture point your account is configured to alarm 30 days ahead of on any file still carrying unreleased recoverable depreciation. Published policy windows run ~180 days to two years; yours is a parameter you set.
More likely to qualify a lead when first contact happens inside the first hour, across ~1.25 million leads studied by Harvard Business Review — which is the whole argument for text-back during a storm week.
Figures are published industry research, this build’s own configured values, or illustrative examples — they are not a projection of your results. Cycle lengths are national ranges and vary widely by region, carrier and season. Depreciation windows and forfeiture points are set by the homeowner’s policy, not by us; the number above is the default alarm your account ships with. The response-time study is cross-industry and directionally relevant to home services rather than native to it.
Your first thirty days.
Configuration is ours, not yours. Here’s the sequence — and the one point where we need something only you can give us.
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Days 1–3
Your boards are built, not handed to you blank
All three pipelines, and the fields this trade actually needs: squares, pitch, existing layers, decking condition and material on the property side; carrier, claim number, date of loss, adjuster name and phone, deductible amount and whether it’s collected, replacement-cost and actual-cash-value amounts, recoverable depreciation with its release-due date, mortgage company and endorsement status, supplement status, format and amount on the claim side; storm event date and cohort, manufacturer certification, warranty registration due, permit jurisdiction and the homeowners-association flag across both.
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Days 3–7
Lead capture and triage go live
A damage intake with roofing answer choices rather than a name-and-email form — what’s wrong with the roof, how urgent, whether a claim already exists and with which carrier, and what the roof is made of — so the file branches retail or insurance at intake instead of after somebody’s phone call. Plus the canvass intake, the chat widget and your Google Business Profile, all wired to the boards with missed-call text-back on and every source tagged.
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Week 2
The things we need from you
Text-message registration and your sending domain both require a real human with your business details — regulation, not paperwork we invented. We prepare the submissions; you approve and sign, and that sets your go-live date. Alongside it, the values your account runs on: your license number, your permit jurisdictions, your manufacturer certification level, your standard deposit percentage, and the forfeiture window you want the depreciation alarm set against.
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Week 3
Payments connected
Your Square account and dual-priced invoicing go live: the deposit invoice computed at your deposit percentage of the quoted amount, e-signed proposals and contingency agreements, text-to-pay for repair tickets and final payments from the driveway, and a deposit schedule on the card for the jobs that need staged draws.
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Week 4
The long lane is armed
The depreciation chase, the deductible collection, the warranty registration deadline, the permit and homeowners-association waiting states, the gated review and the referral ask, the storm cohort reactivation and the annual inspection — all scheduled, then running whether or not anyone remembers them. Your existing files come in with their claim data, so last season’s open depreciation balances start getting chased in week four rather than never.
Every automation ends at a payment. So we own that part too.
Follow-up that ends in “I’ll mail an invoice” is half a system. Your account runs on Square for processing, with dual-priced invoicing on top: the cash price is the price, and a customer paying by card sees the card price beside it and chooses.
The deposit computes itself
A signed retail job fires a deposit invoice at your deposit percentage of the quoted amount — the account ships at 30% and you set your own — before a permit fee is paid or a single square is ordered.
The deductible is a real invoice, on its own clock
It is the homeowner’s obligation and it has to be collected, so it gets invoiced like any other balance rather than living as a note on a job. Uncollected, it holds the file open and suppresses the review request.
Final payment happens in the driveway
The walkthrough closes, the certificate of completion generates, and the invoice lands in the same thread the confirmation ran in with a pay link on it. On the insurance lane that same document is what goes to the carrier to start the second check.
Dual pricing on volume you already run
Deposits, repair tickets, deductibles and final payments add up to steady card volume at ~3% in processing. Dual pricing hands that cost back. The mortgage company endorsing a check and the homeowner writing one notice nothing — they already pay the cash price.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — all three boards, the claim fields, the compliance rails, the payment rails. The difference is how much marketing and reporting surface you want on top.
- CRM and all three pipelines
- Unified inbox — text, email, chat
- Four calendars and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys — the damage intake and the canvass form
- AI lead follow-up
- Payments and invoicing
- Everything in Starter
- Full marketing suite
- Reputation management — the review request with its suppression rules
- Social planner
- Memberships and recurring billing
- Documents and contracts — e-signed proposals and agreements
- Advanced reporting
- Priority support
Fair questions.
My year is four good months. I’m not paying monthly for software that matters in the spring.
The four months are when the leads arrive. The other eight are when last season’s money either gets collected or doesn’t: the depreciation balances still open, the supplements still in review, the warranty registrations still inside their window, the permits still not closed out. That is exactly the work that has no urgency attached to it and therefore never gets done by hand. If it recovers one held-back balance a season it has covered itself several times over — and we’re not going to put a number on your file for you.
I already run a roofing production and estimating system. I’m not ripping it out.
Don’t. Measurement, material ordering, job costing and production stay exactly where they are. What moves is the layer above them: the two boards and their stages, the follow-up that chases the third parties, the claim and depreciation deadlines, the intake and the missed-call recovery, and the money. This board tells your production system which jobs are real; it doesn’t try to order shingles.
My canvassers won’t log anything. That’s just how it is.
Which is why the canvass intake is address-first and short enough to finish standing on a lawn, and why the storm cohort is stamped at the property rather than typed by a person. What a canvasser has to enter is the address and what they saw. The homeowner’s details arrive when the inspection books, and the file is already there waiting for them.
I’m not having software send messages about somebody’s insurance claim.
Neither are we, and it’s built that way deliberately. The system tracks claim paperwork, meeting dates and supplement status, and it messages your people about them. It does not file claims, write supplements, argue scope, or contact a carrier for anyone, and it cannot be configured to. Customer-facing copy on an insurance file is status — where the job is, what happens next, who is waiting on whom.
Most of my collections come as checks from a mortgage company. What does dual pricing do for me?
Nothing at all on those, and that’s the point — a check payer’s experience doesn’t change, because the cash price is their price already. What it works on is the card volume you do run: retail deposits, repair tickets, deductibles, final payments and anything the homeowner pays directly. That is steady, unglamorous volume at ~3% in processing, and dual pricing hands the cost back on all of it.
Is this just a generic CRM with a roofing sticker on it?
No, and the stage names above are the first test — those are the boards your account actually opens with, and no vendor selling a roofing snapshot publishes theirs. The second test is what you can’t buy anywhere: we went looking for a roofing build that ships a depreciation-release chase, a deductible-collection gate, a carrier-scheduled adjuster block with an owner alert, and a supplement status machine. What is publicly sold is the same niche paragraph with the trade noun swapped — one roofing page still has copy about treatments on it. That gap is why this build exists.
The next hail event is already on somebody’s calendar. It isn’t on yours.
Board now and the boards are built, the intakes are live and the long lane is armed before the phone starts ringing — instead of during.
Automate With Us provides software and configuration services. Figures shown are published industry research or illustrative examples — they are not projections, guarantees, or representations of the results you should expect. Individual results depend on your market, pricing, capacity and execution. Processing costs vary by card mix and volume; the ~3% figure is illustrative and your effective rate will differ. Payment processing is provided through Square and is subject to Square’s approval and terms. Text-message and email sending are subject to carrier and regulatory registration. This software tracks insurance claim paperwork, meeting dates and supplement status; it does not file, prepare, argue or negotiate insurance claims, and nothing here is legal advice or a statement of what your state requires. Deductible, licensing, permit and warranty-registration requirements are set by state, jurisdiction and manufacturer program and vary; rules referenced here are attributed to the places they were measured, and your account is configured to your own jurisdiction as you confirm it. Terms · Privacy