Ask a roofing owner what a reroof costs and you hear materials, labor, disposal and permits. Ask what the truck and trailer cost on that job and you usually get a pause. Vehicle payments, fuel, insurance and repairs land in general expenses, so every job report ignores them and every estimate leaves them out.
Why Equipment Hides in Overhead
The costs arrive one at a time and none of them mention a job. A loan payment, a fuel card statement, an insurance invoice and a tire bill each look like a company expense. Added together, they are the price of getting a crew, a ladder and a load of shingles to the roof.
Leaving them out causes two problems:
- Job margin is overstated. In an illustrative case, a job that shows 34% gross margin earns 32% once equipment is charged to it.
- Estimates under-recover. If the estimate has no equipment line, the cost has to be paid from margin on every job.
Building a Daily Rate
You do not need to log every mile. A daily rate per crew setup is accurate enough to price and measure jobs:
- Total the annual cost of the truck, trailer and job-site equipment: payments or depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance, registration and tires.
- Estimate realistic job days. Count days the crew actually works on roofs, not days on the calendar. Weather and winter slowdowns cut this number.
- Divide. The result is your cost per job day for that crew.
Repeat for each crew and for shared items such as a lift or a tear-off machine. Review the rate every year, and sooner after a new truck or a large repair.
Worked Example: A Two-Day Reroof
All figures are illustrative. One crew runs a truck and a trailer:
| Annual cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Truck payments | $9,600 |
| Insurance | $3,600 |
| Fuel | $7,200 |
| Maintenance, tires, registration | $3,600 |
| Trailer and job-site equipment | $4,000 |
| Total | $28,000 |
Divide by 200 job days and the rate is $140 a day. A two-day, $13,200 reroof carries $280 of equipment cost, or 2.1 points of margin. Over 100 such jobs, that is $28,000 that never reached a job report.
Utilization matters as much as the rate. If the crew works only 150 days, the same costs come to about $187 a day. Charging jobs $140 leaves $7,000 unrecovered. Track the gap monthly so you can see it before year-end.
Booking It in QuickBooks
- Keep actual costs where they are. Vehicle and equipment expenses stay in their accounts with their vendors.
- Add two accounts. Equipment Use is a cost of goods sold account. Equipment Cost Applied is an offset in the vehicle expense section.
- Post a monthly journal entry. Multiply job days by the daily rate for each job, debit Equipment Use with the job tagged, and credit Equipment Cost Applied. Profit does not change. Cost moves from overhead to the jobs that used it.
- Review the variance. If applied cost runs below actual, the rate is too low or utilization is down.
Put It in the Estimate
Add an equipment line to your estimate template: crew days times daily rate. Your estimator should not have to guess. If a job needs three crew days, the line reads three days at the current rate, and the number moves whenever you update the rate.
Once a quarter, compare estimated crew days with actual days by job type. Jobs that run long cost you twice, in labor and in equipment, and the report will show which job types and which crews drift. That tells you whether the fix belongs in the estimate, the schedule or the crew. For more on how this line interacts with price, see markup vs margin, and for the same estimated-versus-actual method applied to labor, read labor hours per square by crew.