Built for the realities of Roofers.

The record a roof leaves behind

A roof job is remembered for years and documented for minutes. The guarantee runs long after the scaffold comes down, the insurer wants photographs of what the storm actually did, and the customer who rings in year six wants to know what was fitted and by whom. Most roofing firms hold all of that in a phone gallery and a memory.

OptiTech Automation keeps photographs, notes and signatures against the job, and the job against the customer and the address. When a guarantee is called on, the search is a name rather than an afternoon. Nothing here is a new habit: your crew already photographs the work, and the platform simply refuses to lose it.

On the compliance side, the honest position. The platform keeps the universal records every trade carries, insurance and right to work and any document you upload against a worker, and it reminds you before dated ones lapse. Roofing specific tickets are not yet a tracked category of their own, so today they live as uploaded documents rather than as their own renewal clock. That is the truth of it, said before you sign rather than after.

The ghosted quote, and the storm week

Two things cost roofing firms more than anything on a spreadsheet. The first is the quote that goes nowhere: someone drives out, climbs up, prices the work and never hears back. The second is the storm week, when the phone rings faster than anyone can answer it and the callers you miss simply ring the next roofer on the list.

A deposit at the point of booking changes the first one. Very few roofers ask for money before the ladder goes up, which is exactly why asking works: the customer who is serious pays and the customer who was shopping does not, and you find that out before the van moves rather than after. The deposit goes straight into your own Stripe account.

The storm week is changed by the page rather than the phone. Bookings arrive around the clock, land in the same diary, and reach the crew directly. The caller at half past nine on a Tuesday night books a slot instead of leaving a voicemail you find on Thursday.

Booking first, phone second

Roofing still sells almost entirely by phone. The customer rings, someone promises to come and look, and a week of chasing follows. Booking first turns that around. The customer picks a real survey or repair slot on your own booking page, pays the deposit by card and gets a confirmation, and you find a booked job in the calendar instead of a message to return.

That matters most for the jobs nobody wants to chase. Gutter clears, a slipped tile, a small flat roof repair: individually not worth an hour of your evening, collectively most of a crew week. Booked online they cost you nothing to win.

Nothing stops you taking phone bookings. Plenty of roofing customers will always ring, and those jobs go into the same calendar in seconds. Booking first just means the phone stops being the only door into your business, and the only bottleneck in it.

Crews, sites and who goes where

Roofing runs on crews rather than individuals, and the oldest complaint on any roofing firm is that the boss sends his mate to the good jobs. It is usually unfair and it is always corrosive, because the person who believes it starts looking elsewhere.

Work is distributed across the team rather than handed out by whoever is nearest to the phone, and you keep the final say on every assignment. The value is not that a machine decides. It is that the pattern is visible, to you and to them, so the argument stops being about favouritism and starts being about the work.

Seasonal labour fits the same rota. When the autumn surge arrives and you take on extra hands for eight weeks, they go on the rota, take jobs, and come off it again without you rebuilding anything.

One flat price

OptiTech Automation starts at £199 a month plus a one-off £129 on the Start-up Stage, covering up to five workers. Standard is £599 a month plus a one-off £249 and covers up to fifteen. Flat within your stage: not per user, not per lead, not per booking. A storm month costs the same as a quiet one, which in roofing is the whole point.

There is no contract. Cancel any month with 30 days notice and take your data with you as CSV. If the numbers do not work for your business, the honest answer is to leave, and the platform makes that easy on purpose.

The rules a roofing diary has to work around

The Work at Height Regulations 2005 set out what a roofing employer must do before anyone goes up a ladder. Regulation 4 says work at height must be properly planned, appropriately supervised and carried out safely so far as is reasonably practicable, and that it should only go ahead when the weather does not put anyone's safety at risk. Regulation 5 adds that nobody organises, plans, supervises or does the work unless they are competent, or are supervised by someone who is. None of that is paperwork OptiTech Automation can do for you, the planning, the competence and the weather call stay with you and your crew, on the day. What the platform holds is the trail that shows the job happened, photographs against the job, notes on who was on the roof and when, and a record still there years later if a guarantee is queried.

Storm names now run on a fixed calendar. The Met Office, working with Met Eireann and KNMI, names a storm when it has the potential to cause disruption or damage serious enough to trigger an amber or red warning, and the naming list runs from early September to late August the following year, timed to the start of autumn when low pressure systems become more likely. For a roofing firm that season is not background weather, it is the diary. Planned repairs get squeezed against emergency call-outs, and the firms that lose out are the ones where a Tuesday night enquiry sits as a voicemail until Thursday. A deposit taken at booking means a survey slot is worth defending, and the same booking page that takes a routine gutter clear in June takes a storm call-out in November, landing in one diary instead of two.

NFRC guidance to homeowners is specific: get the quote or estimate in writing, except perhaps for a small emergency repair, and ask for a guarantee on new or refurbishment work, ideally an insurance backed guarantee that stands independently of the contractor's own promise, so the cover survives even if the business does not. That written record, quote agreed, guarantee issued, is exactly the kind of paper a roofing firm loses fastest, usually to a phone gallery nobody has time to keep straight. Booking through OptiTech Automation puts the quote and the deposit against the job from the start, and the job's photographs and signatures sit against the same customer and address for as long as the guarantee runs. When a customer calls in year four asking what was agreed, the answer is a search rather than a guess. The platform keeps what was written down. It does not write the guarantee itself.

Who this is not for

An honest note. If you are a one-man roofing business with a paper diary you like, steady work from two builders and no plan to grow past the van, you probably do not need this. A monthly bill has to earn its keep, and it earns it on deposits that stop wasted journeys, bookings that arrive while you sleep and admin you stop doing by hand.

It is also not a full estimating package. If your firm prices large commercial roofs from measured schedules and lives inside a takeoff tool, that part stays where it is. OptiTech Automation is built for roofing teams running crews and reactive work: two vans and up, or the sole trader taking on a first employee this year.