Roofing software: the holdback released every year

Ontario names twenty-three compulsory trades. A roofer is not one of them. Neither is a carpenter, a bricklayer, a painter, a tilesetter or a drywall finisher.

The sheet metal worker forming the flashing three metres away is on that list twice, under 308A and 308R, and British Columbia certifies the trade as well. So on the same roof, on the same afternoon, one pair of hands is regulated and the other is not.

Which means roofing software in Canada cannot be sold on compliance. Nobody is checking your ticket. What is checked, hard and on a clock, is whether you preserved a lien in time and whether the holdback came back.

Three provinces, three lien calendars

Ontario gives sixty days to preserve and ninety more to perfect. Alberta gives sixty, or ninety where concrete is involved. British Columbia gives forty-five days from the head contract and a year to enforce — Ontario and Alberta sixty days, BC forty-five, and forty-five days from the head contract if the work is on the coast.

Zirko files nothing and computes no deadline. Those are provincial statutes and the judgement belongs to your lawyer. What it does is make the date a thing that lives on the job: a project status you named yourself — torn off, dried in, substantially performed, released — including its language and its document template, and a reminder rule with a lead time and a text you wrote.

The log records every message with its trigger, its recipient and its moment, so the same notice cannot go out twice, not even if the run starts twice. A dry run goes through the same functions and sends nothing, so you can watch a real month before the first mail reaches an owner.

Holdback comes back every year now

Ten percent of every payment sits in holdback until liens expire, and since 1 January 2026 an Ontario owner has to publish a notice within fourteen days of each contract anniversary so that the year's holdback can be released — released every year. On a multi-year re-roof program that is money which used to sit until the very end.

In the documents list the held-back amount is simply an outstanding balance beside the invoice, visible with everything else that is open, rather than a note in somebody's head. Zirko issues document numbers on the server from ranges with no gaps, and an issued invoice can no longer be changed: a correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number.

And the money above you is not ordinary money either. Amounts received by a contractor for a project are trust funds, and directors can be personally liable for their misuse — directors are personally liable.

The measurement has to survive the argument

The billable area is never the footprint. Pitch, hips, valleys, waste factor and the difference between shingle squares and a single-ply membrane all sit between the drawing and the quantity.

In Zirko the line item holds the calculation instead of the result. The chain stays in the measurement row, up to five hundred rows are summed to three decimal places, and a chain that does not resolve points at the character and the bracket rather than shrugging. What the browser computes as you type, the server computes again when it saves.

Be clear about the boundary: there is no aerial measurement in Zirko. No satellite or drone takeoff, no imported report from a measurement service, no laser device to pair. You enter the dimensions; Zirko keeps the arithmetic legible and shows where it came from.

What it does not do

No insurance claim workflow, no supplement tracking, no carrier estimate import, no lead marketplace and no canvassing map. No dispatch board that optimizes routes, no map of your trucks and no clock-in with location checking — Zirko does not verify where anybody is standing. Nothing in it is decided by a language model: the automation is eleven fixed rules you switch on one at a time.

Plans are counted in office seats, with field licences for crew who only work outside, and the mobile application comes with every office seat. Nothing is metered by jobs per month, which decides more than the headline price when one month is nine repairs and one full tear-off. Fourteen days free, no payment details, and the trial ends by itself.