Roofing Apps: The Complete Guide
Table of Contents
What is a Roofing App
Before we can break down the ways roofing apps can help produce more sales for your business, let’s start by defining what roofing apps are and what they can do.
Software applications designed for use by roofing contractors—on a desktop or mobile device—are often referred to as roofing applications, or roofing apps for short. Many roofing apps help roofers carry out their everyday tasks, such as capturing customer information and photos at a job site, ordering aerial measurement reports, creating an estimate, or communicating updates about a job from the field to the home office.
Roofing apps are being adopted by companies at a record rate because they help employees work smarter. With better organization and access to information, teams can collaborate more effectively and conduct their work in the most efficient manner. And when you have highly productive and effective teams, you ultimately see growth.
A roofing application, roofing app for short, is software designed for roofing contractors to use on their desktop or mobile device. Roofing apps have features that help roofers manage their daily tasks better and work smarter. They organize documents so roofing crews can work more efficiently and share information easier.
Roofing apps like JobNimbus allow you to easily manage all your contacts, jobs, tasks, documents, and more. Here are additional features JobNimbus has to offer, and integrations you’ll need for a good roofing app:
How Roofing Apps Build Success
In today’s world, it would be nearly impossible to run a company without the necessary data to ensure its success. By not accounting for job costs, contractors would not know how well a job was done, how fast it was done, or how much money went towards the project.
Working blindly certainly isn’t a cost-effective or advantageous strategy. Instead, by using a CRM like JobNimbus, you can keep track and update all of your job costs to make more money. Job cost information also helps managers make decisions by allowing them to review what strategies work and adjust areas that need improvement. Want to see what kind of impact an app could have on your business just with job loss?
Keep accurate and updated job cost reports
A great way to start your construction job cost tracking report is by putting your budget and your actual costs into JobNimbus. JobNimbus lets you update and keep accurate job costs from the start to the end of a construction project.
When tracking your construction job costs, you would first analyze your bid estimate, then begin planning monthly updates, including any approved changes for the project budget. Then you would track committed subcontracts, which are firm costs that are not subject to change. Non-committed costs like labor, equipment, and materials should also be tracked as the project proceeds.
Project managers would then determine how much more money, if any, is needed for non-committed costs to complete the project. This estimate would be placed into the spreadsheet under Estimated Cost to Complete, and then the Estimated Final Cost would be calculated. After adding up the Estimated Variance entries, you would finally be able to tell if you went over or under your initial budget.
Stop jobs from falling through the cracks
Companies that track their job costs are essentially gaining the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals. Without knowing the results of a project, there would be no way in knowing how to improve and no incentive to work harder or faster.
For the best results, your company should regularly record job costs on a weekly basis and share them with your contractors. This will provide the information everyone needs to know and show whether production strategies need to shift in order to reach your goal.
By taking the time to determine all the actual and estimated costs for each project, you can understand how each project is performing and motivate your crew to keep focused on getting results. This process also tells if a project is staying on the right timeline and if you are keeping within your budget. If not, it’s not too late to assess what adjustments need to be made so that you make money rather than lose money.
Generate High-Quality Leads
One way that CRM can improve roofing sales is through generating higher quality leads. The first step to the sales cycle is finding the right leads. CRM software helps you collects leads from your target market through its lead management component. It features tools like lead scoring, categorization and tracking to help you build and pursue leads.
CRM also helps you close more leads than ever by keeping track of what stage customers are in throughout the sales process. CRM offers a number of features that make the sales process as easy as possible, allowing you to make the most out of new leads.
Strengthen Communication
CRM can help your team communicate better and drive more sales. Communication skills are crucial to sales success. As a salesperson, you have a lot of data to track and exchange with team members.
CRM software makes communicating this with team members easier by tracking conversations and letting you share them with those who need access. That way, everyone working with a customer can view and update their data as necessary and ensure that no information gets left behind when switching off between departments.
Improve Customer Experience
CRM is based on improving customer relationships, which is directly linked to sales growth. According to Gartner, when it comes to making a purchase, 64% of people find customer experience more important than price. Companies that provide great customer experience also show an increase in customer retention, customer satisfaction, and perceived company value.
CRM helps improve customer experience through analytic tools that help you get to know your customers. Additionally, you can respond faster to customers through instant notifications and email capabilities. Overall, CRM gathers data and lets you engage with your clients better to develop positive relationships with them.
Save Time and Money
CRM can help salespeople be more time-efficient and yield higher profits. As a roofer, you shouldn’t have to deal with tedious admin tasks and manual data entry. Doing so will lose your potential sales opportunities and revenue.
CRM apps will automate tasks for you. This will remove repetition from your workflow and reduce costly errors. By decreasing expenses, you can increase revenue. CRM will also decrease the time and money involved in closing a sale and targeting existing customers. By monitoring customer interactions through CRM, you can determine which customers you should pursue and sell to.
Types of Roofing Apps
Roofing apps can be divided into eight types based on their function: operational, analytical, collaborative, and cloud-based.
Operational
This type of CRM focuses on the automation and streamlining of workflows in sales, marketing, and customer service to build a structure for customer support. They provide access to customer information and cover concepts to manage relationships with customers.
Analytical App
Analytical CRM apps focus on data mining and interpretation to analyze customer data and improve business processes. Features include reporting and dashboards to look at sales data, financial data, and marketing data. The goal of analytical CRM is to increase customer satisfaction and retention rate.
Collaborative App
A collaborative CRM focuses on promoting teamwork and communication between the sales, marketing, and support teams. Collaborative CRM includes communication tools such as instant messaging, social components, email and file sharing.
Cloud-based App
It’s important to have a roofing software app that is cloud-based. These project management apps are readily accessible by users and clients from wherever and whatever device. They can usually be accessed through a web browser since they are hosted online by a third-party provider. These apps can also include some individual project management software.
On-Premise App
These solutions are installed locally into your company’s server, which means access to the system is exclusive and can only be retrieved through specific devices that are connected to the local server.
Individual App
Individual project management systems are web-based and simple. They’re often used for those with a light need for project management solutions. Individual programs don’t include as many features as other types but are very straightforward and easy to understand.
Open API App
This software is a publicly available option that provides end-users with programmatic access to the already existing application. These apps give users more freedom to set up projects and adjust preferences to suit specific business needs.
Features of a Roofing App
Take and Upload Photos to Your Roofing App
As a roofer, it’s crucial that you document the photos you take of your job progress from beginning to end. However, documenting and organizing photos can be difficult to do without the help of roofing software. Most roofing apps will give you the ability to take and upload photos from your phone as you’re on the job site.
You can capture photos of roofs, gutters, siding, and other exterior shots on JobNimbus while using the mobile app. Your pictures are uploaded instantly to the web. You can also share those job photos with customers, subcontractors, and insurance adjusters via email or Job Share. Photos will get stored with the job and will be available whenever you need them. Make sure to know which photos to take to track progress.
Set Up Automation
There’s nothing better than cutting some unnecessary repetition out of your life. Automation helps you increase productivity and time efficiency. Roofing apps give you the option to set up workflow automation in order to get things done faster. You can automatically send emails to customers, change customer statuses, create tasks, send reminders and more.
Time-based automations are quick and easy and can be edited at any time. You can automate your workflow to set triggers when you want to accomplish something or receive notifications. Notifications will pop up instantly on new assignments and tasks that are due that day. The automation ensures that nothing will slip through the cracks, so it’s worth having roofing software to take care of that for you.
Prepare Estimates & Invoices
The ability to create, send, manage, and report on estimates and invoices is a key function to roofing software. With JobNimbus software, you can view live reports to track invoices as they change statuses and are being acted upon. This function helps with preparing and tracking finances as you execute a job.
Roofing apps also let you build professional-looking estimates & invoices with the customer at the job site. You can save products and services, use templates, and pull from previously saved quotes to build them faster every time. Also, separate your estimates by trades for all your exterior jobs and have the ability to email your estimates with just a couple taps as well as collect payments and run reports.
Capture Leads and Signatures at the Door
You can use roofing mobile apps to increase sales numbers by capturing leads and signatures right at the door. This will significantly increase your success by immediately collecting customers’ information and facilitating better engagement and long-lasting relationships.
With JobNimbus as your mobile roofing app, you can add new leads on your smartphone or tablet and they’ll sync automatically. Quickly call, text, or email your clients to keep in contact. Roofing apps will help you make sure no lead falls through the cracks. Additionally, you can sell faster and earn referrals by providing a better experience for your customers.
Create & Manage Appointments & Tasks
Managing appointments and tasks will be one of the main features you’ll use on a daily basis on your roofing software. Advanced tools in roofing software make managing the many roofing tasks you have to do easier to carry out. It also helps to remind you of important meetings with clients along with the specifics of a job you’re working on for that day.
You can track your appointments, to-dos, work, and follow-ups as you sell jobs and move towards completion. With shared calendars, JobNimbus advanced roofing software gives you full control to keep your life and business organized.
Track Your Jobs and Manage Your Production
As you track jobs you’re working on, you can assess what areas may need some improvement or change of direction. Using the information provided from your roofing app will help you plan for future jobs and see better results. Roofing apps also allow you to easily view, track and update all your current roofing jobs and individually manage work order and due dates.
With roofing apps, you can manage job statuses, track notes and emails, and upload attachments and photos. Tracking jobs can also help you make more money. All these tools in roofing app software will make tracking and managing your jobs ever so easy.
Create Reports for Everything
When running a roofing business, it’s important to know how your business is performing. Roofing apps let you create and customize reports on data from estimates and material orders to job performance and more. These reports give insight into what is happening in different parts of your business and help you reach your business goals.
In JobNimbus, you can report on anything you do, including sales pipeline, activity, time logs, payments, and more. JobNimbus has a live reporting tool where you can see what is happening in real-time and it updates instantly as you make changes to the report. That means you’ll always see the most up-to-date information in your roofing software at exactly the right time.
Assign Work Orders to Your Team or Subs
You can adjust and distribute assignments to team members with roofing apps. This feature helps you see how a project is moving along and view how employees are spending their time working. By seeing what work orders your team has, you can evaluate what the priorities are and manage your work all in one place.
With roofing app software, you can divide your work orders out for roofing, gutters, siding and other exterior trades with work orders. JobNimbus lets you track statuses, assign tasks, and view your work orders on interactive boards. Keep your production moving with contractor project management tools for every step of your process.
Empower Yourself & Your Team to Succeed
Roofing apps let your team share their work tasks so everyone can get on the same page and contribute to a project. This helps increase productivity while you and your team work together to check off priorities. Use roofing apps to keep customers and insurance adjusters in-the-know, as well as share details with subcontractors. You can also get information from your crew on parts of a job that need improvement. Then, you can get back on track and plan for success.
Shared calendars let you see everyone’s schedule and coordinate work. Roofing software lets you see everyone’s tasks on a map and know exactly what’s getting done. Features include dispatching your team, sending messages by mentioning team members in notes, and making sure everyone knows what they need to do, whether they’re in the office or out in the field.
Submit Material Orders to Suppliers
A huge part of roofing is getting materials ordered from suppliers, so your crew has what they need to get started on a project. These orders need to be made and received by strict deadlines in order to stay on track with your work. Roofing apps makes submitting material orders easy and by directly emailing the supplier. You can save the supplier as a related contact and make a template to make the process even faster.
When you build your own contracts and proposals, JobNimbus will auto-fill contact and job details. In JobNimbus, creating material orders is easy. You can build material orders from your estimates in one click, edit them if you need to, and then email them to suppliers. You’ll get all the materials you need without the hassle of creating new orders or picking up the phone.
Customize Workflows
One of the great things about having roofing software is the ability to customize your workflow, or just about anything to your liking. With roofing apps, you can digitize your existing workflow to be more efficient. Test what works for you and use the process you’ve learned to perfect for future workflows. You can customize types, statuses, and more with roofing software.
Sync Everything from Anywhere
Because roofing apps are usually cloud-based, you can access your work from anywhere, at any time, and from any device. You don’t need the internet to save and sync your work. Plus, you can enter information from your device whether you’re in the office or out in the field. Your roofing software follows where you go.
Send Emails With Attachments
Nothing’s worse than not knowing what’s going on in your business. Roofing apps let you communicate better with your crew, customers, and others through email. In JobNimbus, everything, including emails and text messages, is recorded. That way, you know what your job status is and what you have yet to complete. Sending emails with attachments helps you build a stronger communication channel with other parties.
You can email directly from your roofing software and replies will appear automatically. The email system allows for a strong relationship between you, your customers and partners. Having roofing software to store everything ensures that no email or attachment is left out of the conversation. You can also reply directly to emails and forward them with a simple click.
Take Notes
Taking notes is an important part of the roofing industry, but keeping notes is another story. Imagine keeping contact information or specific details for a job in a notebook, then losing your notebook. It would be a major step back for your business. An effective roofing software will be able to keep and organize notes you took from meetings with customers and team members.
JobNimbus specifically has a feature where you can use notes for communication and collaboration. Jot down notes you took from a call or save an important email in your roofing software. You can also record the work you did that day to track progress. Note-taking will help you concentrate while you’re on a job and listen to the customer’s specific situation and needs. This will help guarantee you do the best job possible and fix all the client’s pressing issues.
Build Budgets
Roofing apps lets you analyze what parts of a project require more time and effort, which tells you where you should invest more of your budget into. As a roofing business, it’s essential that you create a budget and keep track of your job expenses. Put your budget and actual costs into your roofing software, where you can divide multiple categories in a spreadsheet to track job costs from the duration of your project.
You should regularly track and share your job costs to understand how your project is performing and whether you are staying within budget or not. With the help of roofing software, you can make adjustments to your budget so you make sure to earn money, not lose it. Roofing software can help you set limits and track commissions.
Time Tracking
In order to have effective job management, you need to make sure everything is on the right course towards success and properly time track. Roofing apps give you the option to add time estimates to tasks and track the time you worked for. It will also create time log reports for you. Time tracking gives you a better perspective on what’s going on during your project and what your hours are going towards.
With JobNimbus, you can track time spent on tasks for yourself and your employees. This feature gives you a bigger picture of how much time each job requires, or compares actually spent hours to how many hours you predicted would go into the project. Time tracking also gives you the opportunity to split up tasks if you see that too many hours are going into less important tasks than necessary.
Top 10 Apps for Roofers
CompanyCam allows a contractor’s team to snap smart photos in the field that automatically connect themselves to the right project (using GPS) and instantly sync back to their home office. They can easily find photos when they need them. No more emailing, texting photos, and organizing folders. Plus, the real-time project feed enables their team to see the current progress at each job site, no matter where they are.
All-Inclusive Roofing App
Roofing App – CRM
Track leads using customizable statuses and workflow. Log notes and track follow-up tasks.
Contact management. Add, edit, and call contacts directly from the app. Activity and Details are now tabs, making it easier to swipe left and right on a contact to see what you need.
Email notifications to let your team know about assigned contacts and tasks. Daily task reminders.
Offline Mode*: Continue to use the full functionality of adding contacts, jobs, tasks, notes, and photos when offline. When you come back online, JobNimbus will seamlessly sync with the server and other devices.
Type and Status at the top of each Contact/Job to take up less room and be less prone to miss-taps. Just tap on the status at the top to choose a new one, or change it while editing.
Roofing App – Project Management
Tasklist to give you a better view of what’s overdue, due now, and upcoming.
Schedule appointments, tasks, and meetings for yourself and others.
Calendar view for easy scheduling and planning. We’ve enriched the calendar with a new Agenda view and more to see your day in a whole new way.
Upload photos directly to a task, job, or contact.
Manage jobs with a “digital file folder” for each of your projects. Attach documents, notes and related tasks.
Manage documents including contracts, estimates, invoices, PDFs, and photos.
How to Get Your Team to Use It
So you’ve found a CRM/app/game/ritual that you’re happy with and you’re thinking this will be the end of all your worries.
Then you take it back to your team and the joy of finding something to better your company is dashed to pieces on the rocks of reality, ending up a few months later with nothing to show for it because your team never used the darn thing.
This is a disastrous scenario, but it’s by no means uncommon. Over 50% of all CRM software adoptions are unsuccessful for one reason or another.
Here are the 6 steps to help your new thing adoption be as successful as possible:
1 Get Something Simple
CRM software adoption will be literally hopeless if you choose software that is beyond your team’s level of ability and interest.
Simple interfaces, easy button layouts, painless customization, and navigable menus are just a few things to look for. You’ll know it when you see it but always look at CRM software through your team’s eyes. Ask yourself: Will they look at it and scream bloody murder or will they have a giddy smirk of hope?
Go with the latter.
2 Explain Importance/Convert
A good salesperson knows how to do his/her job. Unfortunately, this sometimes doesn’t include the CRM software that you want them to use. Or still, sometimes just simple old habits can get in the way of using any new-fangled software.
Your job is to explain to the members of your team exactly why CRM is necessary going forward and why their participation matters. You need to explain why and how CRM will benefit them, how it will make their jobs faster and easier, and how it can improve their chances of earning more.
To be blunt and perhaps a bit crude, the best user is an addict, and an addict is born from knowing what he or she wants. Make your team members want CRM software and you’ll be on your way to successful adoption.
3 Train
Training will only work properly if the team is already sold on the system, per step #2. Once they’re in the mindset that this is the tool they need, they’ll be engaged in learning how best to use it.
Take advantage of every training opportunity offered by the CRM provider. Provide documentation, tutorials, and support lines so team members can actively seek answers and new ways of getting their work done.
This point also goes hand-in-hand with step #1, because training will be much easier on a simple piece of software. And, once your team understands the software, their daily use will be much easier to accomplish.
4 Set Goals
Just like in the business world, you’ll never get anywhere without a few worthwhile and achievable goals. So, set some with your team. Don’t set the goals for them, but present them with some goal ideas and work with them to decide what is reasonable and will help motivate them to consistent use of the CRM software.
5 Lead By Example
The best of captains are digging the graves with the rest of the crew, suffering with them in their pain and sharing in their celebrations. If you ever hope to get your team to use CRM, you have to be that type of captain and use it yourself.
Taking your own CRM medicine will help you choose the best tool in terms of usability, help you understand the importance and the why, help you train your team on the best ways to use it, and it will help you to set good goals with them for success.
6 Gamify
This is the new buzzword in software. Heralding from the achievements made increasingly popular by gaming platforms like Xbox Live and Apple’s iOS Game Center, gamification is often cited as the great motivator. While it might not be for everybody, almost anyone can be motivated by achievements, acknowledgment, and accolades.
Find some way to create milestones and physical rewards that everyone can see and earn. Create team-wide goals that the whole team can work towards achieving, like a dinner out together. A little healthy office competition can help spice things up and motivate each member of the team to do just a bit better.
Be sure to download the infographic to share with your team.
What Now?
There are a lot of ways to figure out what roofing apps you need and are best for you. Make sure to schedule demos with any company you’re looking at, check out reviews, and talk to others who are using roofing software.
The great news is there are a lot of amazing tools in all kinds of roofing apps to help you bring your company to the next level. If you need help figuring out what you need or what tools to go with, feel free to reach out to us at JobNimbus anytime, and be sure to check out the JobNimbus demo!
