Roofing software for roofers: three start dates

A roofing job has three start dates: the one you quoted, the one the scaffolder can manage, and the one the weather allows. Only the first is yours, and it is the one the customer remembers.

The area you bill is not the area on the drawing

A roof plane is longer than the footprint underneath it, every hip and valley changes the cut, and a slate roof loses more to laps than a single ply flat roof does. The number on the invoice is the end of a calculation, not a measurement.

In Zirko the line item holds that calculation instead of the result. A chain such as 100+(5.1*4)/2 stays in the measurement row, up to five hundred rows are summed to three decimal places, and a chain that does not work out points at the character and the bracket rather than showing an error. What the browser works out while you type, the server works out again when it saves. Anyone who asks eighteen months later where 47.3 came from reads the answer in the document.

What Zirko does not do is measure the roof for you. There is no aerial or satellite takeoff, no drone imagery, no import of a measurement report from anyone else's tool. You put the dimensions in; the software keeps the arithmetic honest and legible.

Bad weather is a time type, not a lost afternoon

Zirko carries twelve time types, and bad weather is one of them, alongside working hours, travel time, leave, sickness and short time. Each has its own effect on target hours and the leave account, so a washed-out Tuesday is a record with a reason on it rather than a hole in the week.

The planning board runs from one week to half a year and already shows leave, sickness and the public holidays of your operating country. Drag a job onto a team row and it produces one assignment per person; book two things onto the same person and it says so. What it will not do is optimise a route, forecast capacity or put your sites on a map.

The deduction comes out of labour only, so the line has to split it

Roofing is construction operations, so the Construction Industry Scheme applies to what you pay your subcontractors, and the deduction of 20 or 30 percent is worked out from the labour element alone — the mechanics are in 20 per cent, 30 per cent or nothing at all.

In Zirko a service is an assembly of cost types: labour minutes valued through a wage group, material, equipment and subcontracting. The split exists in the price list before anyone asks you for a payment and deduction statement, and it is what the post-costing sets target against actual on. If you are going for gross payment status, the three tests and the £30,000 are set out in the three tests, the £30,000, and the 90 days.

The invoice that must not show VAT

Work for another contractor in the chain usually falls under the domestic reverse charge, which means your invoice carries the wording and no VAT amount at all. Get it wrong in the other direction and you have charged tax that was never due — when your invoice must not show VAT draws the line.

Zirko carries a tax rate and a tax category on every line, and refuses to finalise a document where the rate and the category contradict each other. It does not decide which side of the line a job falls on. That is a fact about your customer's status, and no software can look at it.

Priced by seats, not by roofs

Plans count office seats, with field licences for anyone who only works on site, and the mobile application comes with every office seat. Nothing is metered by jobs per month — which matters more than the headline price when a good month is eleven small repairs and one re-roof. Fourteen days free, the full range of functions, no payment details, and the trial ends by itself.