Margin per roof, not margin per year
A roofing company's year is just the sum of its jobs, so we report where the money is made or lost: quoted versus actual, per job, reviewed monthly in season. The revenue side is usually fine; the cost side hides the story. Labour has to be loaded, wage plus employer CPP, EI at 1.4 times the employee rate, vacation pay and a WSIB premium in one of the highest rate classes going, before a crew-hour shows its true cost. Materials variance flows in from the job-costed books, and callbacks get charged to the job that caused them instead of vanishing into overhead.
Cut that way, patterns show up fast: steep-pitch jobs that always run over on hours, insurance work whose approvals burn unpaid weeks, the flat-roof niche quietly out-earning everything else. Pricing next season from those patterns is the entire point of our Fractional CFO service; the statements are just the raw material.
The second-crew question
Almost every roofer with a full calendar asks it: do we add a crew? The answer is a contribution-margin calculation, not a feeling. A second crew brings fixed costs, a lead hand at a premium, another truck, another equipment set, more office time, and it must clear those from the margin its jobs contribute after loaded labour and materials. The deciding metric is booked backlog: weeks of signed work at full price, not the hope that marketing catches up.
The failure mode we guard against is capacity that fills itself at a discount. Two crews running at thin margin can leave you with more risk and less profit than one crew at full margin. We model the break-even weeks before you hire, and we track the new crew's contribution separately for its whole first season so the question gets a factual answer.
Equipment and the bank
Trucks, trailers, hoists and lifts are the second-largest spend after labour, and each one is a three-way decision: buy, finance or rent. The deciding number is utilization, days of real use per season against the rental cost of covering the same days. A hoist used forty days a season is a different answer than one used eight, and the CCA treatment, Class 10 for the trucks, Class 8 for most equipment, changes the after-tax cost of each path.
When financing is the answer, this is home ground. Walla Assaf spent years in banking and corporate finance before founding Tauro, and our Business Financing Advisory builds lender packages that get equipment loans and operating lines approved on decent terms. Where a lender or bonding facility wants CPA-prepared statements, a compilation engagement comes from the same working papers. The line of credit gets sized and renewed in the fall, when your statements look their best, not in April when you need it.
Cash from last shingle to first ladder
Winter is a cash problem with a known shape, so we manage it with a rolling 13-week cash forecast that starts before the season ends: collections on the final draws, the tax and instalment payments due through winter, which costs stop with the season and which do not. Spring deposits on the backlog help the forecast, but they are earned later, so the forecast treats them as the timing bridge they are, not as profit.
The forecast is also where winter decisions get made with numbers attached:
| Decision | The number that answers it |
|---|---|
| Add a second crew in spring | Weeks of signed backlog and contribution per crew-week |
| Keep the lead hand on all winter | Carrying cost versus spring rehiring and retraining risk |
| Buy or rent the hoist | Utilization days per season against seasonal rental cost |
| Take the low-margin winter ICI job | Cash contribution versus the standby cost of the crew |
| Raise spring prices, and where | Last season's labour and materials variance by job type |
Most roofing companies in the GTA that reach two or three crews hit the same wall: the owner is still the estimator, the scheduler and the finance department. The CFO engagement takes the third job off your plate on a fixed monthly scope, quoted in writing after a free discovery call, and it works best sitting on top of books built the way our End-to-End Accounting service builds them.
