A roofing company trades its clipboards for phones

Monday starts with a stack of cards

The cards come back to the office in a pile. A few are neat. Most have a missing out time, a start time of 7ish, or two jobs squeezed onto one line. One card never comes back at all.

So the office manager sends texts. Who was on the Lakeview job on Tuesday? Did the crew go to the second roof after lunch? The answers come in all day, and payroll waits for them.

The job tickets have the same problem. The address, the shingle color and the note about the dog in the backyard are on paper in one truck. When plans change, the office calls each crew lead, one at a time.

What a wet week costs

Rain is where paper costs the most. This is an example for a company this size, not a measured result, so try it with your own numbers.

In a wet week, rain moves a day of jobs twice. Each time, the office calls all 4 crew leads, about 10 minutes a call. That’s 80 minutes. Sorting out the cards takes another 3 calls or texts a day, about 10 minutes each, or 2.5 hours a week. That’s almost 4 hours a week on the phone, on the days the office is busiest.

The hours you can’t see cost more. When time lands on the wrong job, that job looks better or worse than it really was. You find out at the end, if you find out at all.

Clock in at the job, not on a clipboard

In the example, each roofer gets the Krew Point app on their phone. They sign in with their cell number and a 6-digit PIN. There is no email and no password to forget.

• At the job, they tap Clock In. The time is saved the moment they tap.
• When the crew moves to a second roof, they tap Switch Job, so the hours split the right way.
• On a tear-off day, the crew lead can clock in all five roofers at once, so nobody climbs down for a phone.
• A roof at the end of a dirt road with one bar of signal is fine. The tap waits on the phone until it can send.

The office sees who is on the clock as it happens. Krew Point does not track where anyone goes. Clock In saves the time, not the place.

The job ticket moves to the phone

The paper job ticket goes away too. Each roofer opens Today and sees the day’s jobs, each with its address, its hours and a Directions button.

Each job carries its own checklist: tear-off, dry-in, flashing, shingles, ridge vent, cleanup and the final photos. The crew checks items off as they go, and the office sees 5 of 7 done without a phone call.

When rain moves a job, the office drags it to Thursday on the calendar. Every crew member on it gets an alert that says Your schedule changed. If the move was a mistake, Undo puts it back.

The repair truck and the decking photos

The repair truck runs a different day: five or six short stops, a leak here and a missing shingle there. Each stop is its own job on Today, with its address and Directions, so the hours land on the right customer.

On a re-roof, the crew often finds soft decking under the old shingles. They take photos before it gets covered, and the photos go on the job from the phone, not into somebody’s camera roll.

When the customer asks about the extra decking, the office opens the job and shows them what the crew saw.

Friday: check, approve, send

On Friday, the office opens the pay week grid. Every person’s hours are there by day, with the job they were on. A missed punch gets fixed with a reason, so nobody has to guess later why it changed.

Then the office manager taps Approve Selected and Lock Week, and downloads the payroll file. It’s a CSV file that most payroll tools take.

Monday no longer starts with a stack of cards. The clipboards go back to holding notes for the customer.