Job management software for roofers: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

The forecast turned on Sunday night, so Monday’s re-roof is off. The scaffold went up on Friday and the hire clock has been running since. Two storm calls came in before seven, both wanting someone today, both more likely to be a diagnostic visit than a sale. The gang is standing by, and the customer whose roof is stripped and sheeted has to be told the felt goes back on Wednesday.

Somewhere in that morning you also owe a scaffold inspection, a variation nobody has agreed in writing, and a set of photographs an insurer will read in six weeks.

How a roofing week actually runs

The trade splits into work packages that behave like different businesses: pitched slating and tiling, from full strips down to slipped slates, ridge re-bedding or dry fix, valleys and flashings; flat roofing in felt, EPDM, GRP and liquid applied, mostly garages, dormers and extensions; roofline, meaning fascia, soffit, gutter and downpipe, often the whole of a small job; reactive storm work; and commercial sheet and cladding, where fragile surface risk concentrates.

Work arrives from repeat custom and local reputation, from named storms that produce a spike of leak calls within a day or two, from insurers wanting a written assessment before authorising a claim, from a homebuyer survey holding up a sale, and from main contractors putting a package out to tender. Trading Standards teams run standing warnings about doorstep roofing, so an honest firm starts most domestic conversations from a deficit and substitutes paperwork for trust.

Two calendars then fight each other. Planned re-roofs are anchored to a scaffold and immovable once it is up, while reactive calls arrive with no notice, fastest in exactly the weather that stops planned work. Around 70% of firms report recruitment difficulty limiting the work they can take on, with advanced scaffolders specifically short, so a firm that cannot hire its way to capacity can only grow through throughput.

The price is fixed before anyone can see the battens

A domestic re-roof is priced from the ground, from a ladder, or from a drone photograph. The condition of the battens, the underlay, the rafter ends and the wall plates is knowable from none of them. You find out once the tiles are off, which is the moment the scaffold is up, the customer is committed and the roof is open to the weather.

That is the structural pricing risk of the trade, and it is why every variation becomes a conversation on a driveway with somebody who has already agreed a number and can see daylight through their own roof. The answer is provisional sums and stated rates for the unknown, written into the quote before it is accepted: rafter end repairs at a price each, battens included, new boarding at a rate per square metre. That only works if the customer agreed in writing and can be shown that they did, which is the argument for quoting with a deposit. Scaffold belongs on the same list: it is a third party’s hire quote, priced on a period, and it extends when the job overruns for weather, so the quote has to say who carries that.

Asbestos is the other thing waiting under a pre 2000 roof, and HSE classifies the work by method rather than material: cement sheets taken down carefully are non licensed work, while dropping the same roof so that it substantially breaks up is notifiable non licensed work that has to be notified first. A decision made on site changes the category, so record it before anyone climbs up.

Scaffold sets the start date, and the inspection duty is yours

The most disruptive fact about scheduling a re-roof is that the start date belongs to somebody else’s crew. Scaffold has to be erected, altered and dismantled by competent people, and unless it is a standard TG20 configuration it needs a bespoke design.

What catches small firms is that the inspection duty falls on the user and hirer, not the erector. HSE’s scaffolding guidance requires an inspection after installation and before first use, then at intervals of no more than seven days, and again after any event likely to have affected stability, high winds included. A competent person has to do it, and defects and remedial action have to be recorded.

That is a recurring dated obligation bolted onto an otherwise event driven job, running through the days nobody is on site because it is blowing a gale, and the wind that stops the work is itself the trigger for an extra inspection.

The rest of the access picture changes the quote. HSE’s roof work guidance wants edge protection at the eaves and, on a terrace, at both front and rear, and a double guardrail and toeboard on flat roofs. Almost one in five deaths in construction involve roof work, and every fixed roof should be treated as fragile until a competent person confirms it is not.

CDM 2015 applies to domestic work too, and a homeowner does not make it go away. Regulation 7 transfers the client duties: to the contractor where there is only one, to the principal contractor where there is more than one, or to the principal designer where there is a written agreement to that effect. On a single contractor re-roof that is you, on top of your own duties, and nobody says so at the time; HSE’s page for domestic clients is the plain version.

The 25% rule is the wrong denominator

Ask ten roofing websites when a re-roof becomes notifiable and nine will say it is when you replace more than 25% of the roof. That is not what the regulation says, and the number is not the error. The denominator is.

Regulation 23 of the Building Regulations 2010 sets two triggers for a thermal element, and a roof is one. Either the work is a major renovation, or it renovates or replaces more than 50% of the surface area of that individual element, meaning more than half the roof. Major renovation is defined separately, and that is where the 25% lives: more than a quarter of the whole building envelope, walls, floor, roof, windows and doors together.

The figure comes from the withdrawn Approved Document L1B, which upgraded a renovated element where the area renovated was greater than 50 per cent of the surface of the individual element or 25 per cent of the total building envelope. The trade kept the number and lost the denominator.

A full strip and re-cover on a two storey house usually clears both tests, which is why the folklore survives. Where either applies, the whole element has to meet the standard for a renovated thermal element so far as that is technically, functionally and economically feasible. Take that standard from Approved Document L itself, not a figure on a competitor’s page: it has been amended and much of what circulates is stale. The 2026 edition does not take effect until 24 March 2027.

None of this transfers across the border. In England and Wales a registered contractor can self certify roof refurbishment through the NFRC Competent Person Scheme, formerly CompetentRoofer, rather than going to building control. Wales publishes its own Approved Document L. Scotland runs Section 6 of the Building Standards Technical Handbook through a building warrant, never a building notice, and Northern Ireland runs Technical Booklet F1 through district councils. Self certification for roofing operates in neither.

Evidence for three people who were never on the roof

A roofer’s photographs are read by an insurer deciding whether this is storm damage or wear and tear, by a homeowner who cannot see the defect from the ground and is being asked for four figures, and by building control or the scheme certifying compliance. A claim can be reduced or refused where the roof was already failing, so fresh impact damage has to be distinguishable from years of deterioration by somebody who was never up there.

That evidence is captured on a phone, at height, in the wind, and then has to be found again months later. Its default state is an undifferentiated camera roll, which is the commonest reason a firm loses an argument it should have won.

The fix is unglamorous. Photograph in a fixed order and label as you go: the elevation, the defect, the same defect close up with something for scale, then the same views again once it is stripped. Attach them to the job rather than to a message thread, so one record carries the survey, the write up, the certificate and the invoice. In Dispatch that write up is a completion report with up to twelve photographs, and a job cannot be marked completed until it exists. Certificates attach to the same job as compliance documents and are kept for the life of the job, while photographs a customer sent through a form or a message thread are deleted 30 days after the job closes.

Keep the certificate and any insurance backed guarantee there too. Both are issued after the money has been collected, and both resurface years later at conveyancing.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch keeps the survey, the quote, the weather-moved visit and the invoice on one record, so a job that runs over three weeks and two false starts still reads as one thing.

Send a form link by WhatsApp or text and the customer describes the leak with photographs before you drive out, which turns half the callouts into a proper quote and the rest into a job you priced knowing something. Quote with a deposit percentage and they accept by typing their name, with no login, so materials are ordered against money you have.

Book onto a week calendar and drag it when the forecast turns; the customer is told automatically each time it moves. On site, the completion report captures the write up and up to twelve photographs before the job closes, which is the evidence an insurer reads when it has to tell storm damage from wear and tear. Compliance documents and certificates attach to the job and stay for its life.

Then invoice from the phone, take card payment into your own Stripe account, and let overdue invoices chase themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days. CIS, switched on in Settings, splits labour from materials on every invoice.

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