AI estimating for roofing contractors

£3,000 found on one roof

The example we anonymise but do not exaggerate: a roofing package with a £30,000 materials bill, the same list priced across the merchants through supplier sourcing, the best figure sent back round the table with one question — can you beat it? Final saving: £3,000 on identical specified products delivered to the same site. No corner was cut; the only thing that changed was that the merchants had to compete. Because materials are such a large share of a roofing contractor's turnover, that discipline compounds job after job in a way a labour-heavy trade never sees.

Priced from the roof itself

Before the buying comes the measuring. Pitched work is taken off by slope with ridge, hip, valley and eaves lengths counted, battens and underlay allowed at your coverage figures, and slate-and-a-half or bonnet details picked up rather than averaged away. Flat work is measured by build-up — deck, insulation, membrane layers, upstands and outlets — because a single-ply roof and a built-up felt roof are different jobs wearing the same plan view. Scaffold is priced as the schedule item it deserves to be, with the hire period stated, since a scaffold left standing three extra weeks quietly eats whatever the tender made. The quote itself goes out through automated quoting — measured, priced from your rates, and reviewed by you before a customer sees it.

The weather is a scheduling problem, not an excuse

No software stops the rain. What it stops is the ripple: a washed-out week that turns into double-booked crews, a slate delivery arriving at a site with nobody on it, a scaffold company invoicing for a roof that never started. When a job moves, Nexley moves everything attached to it — the crew, the deliveries, the hire periods, the customer's expectations — with messages you approve before they go. The firms that come out of a bad month ahead are not the ones with better luck; they are the ones whose reshuffles do not cost a week of phone calls.