Roofing contractor software: the lien date on the job

A roof is sold in a driveway and defended eighteen months later. In between sit a tear-off nobody photographed, a change order nobody signed, and a deadline that ran while the office was waiting for the adjuster.

Roofing contractor software is not mainly about estimating. It is about whether the record still exists when somebody disputes the job.

The measurement is a calculation, and it has to stay readable

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. 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 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 will not do is turn an address into a square count.

Before, during, after — on the job, not in a text thread

A job holds its documents, site reports, files, chat and job costing together. The file store is a folder tree you build yourself, to any depth, the same on every job, and for each folder you decide whether the crew sees it: the office always sees everything, on the phone only what was released appears. One click turns a message in the job chat into a file in the job's store.

Report templates are built from blocks — date, period, crew, a number field, free text, photo and a signature taken with a finger, straight on the phone. No account for the homeowner, no printer, no trip back to the office. Fields you mark as required stop a report from being closed half-written, which is the only reliable way a tear-off gets photographed on a day when it is 95 degrees.

The file store keeps no version history: a new draft is a new file, so nobody mistakes last week's scope for the signed one.

The deadline is state law and it does not forgive

California counts ninety days from completion. Texas counts to the fifteenth day of a month rather than in days at all. Four states run four calendars and none of them make an exception for a claim that was still with the carrier — four states, four calendars.

Zirko files nothing and computes no deadline. What it does is make the date a thing on the job: a status you named yourself, a reminder rule with a lead time and a text you wrote, and a log that records every message with its trigger, its recipient and its moment — the same notice cannot go out twice, not even if the run starts twice.

Whether the work is taxable at all is a separate state answer, and Texas splits residential from commercial labor: residential labor is not taxed, commercial labor is. Whether you may do the work is a third: contractor licensing is a state question. Zirko suggests no rate and holds no license register. A US business enters its own rates with up to four components for State, County and City.

What it does not do

No insurance claim workflow, no supplement tracking, no carrier estimate import, no aerial measurement, no lead marketplace and no door-knocking canvass map. There is no language model in the product either — the automation is eleven fixed rules with deadlines and texts you set.

Plans count office seats plus field licenses for crew who only work outside, never jobs per month — which decides more than the sticker price when one month is nine repairs and one full replacement. Fourteen days free, no payment details, and the trial ends by itself.