If the only time you see your roofing company's numbers is when the accountant sends the P&L, a weekly KPI dashboard will help you catch trouble sooner. The short version is that a roofing owner should look at seven numbers every week: cash and what customers owe you, jobs on the books, gross margin on the jobs you finished, leads by source, how fast you answer them, your close rate and revenue per installer. You can pull every one of them by hand in about half an hour, and once you've done it for a few weeks, you'll know which ones deserve a real dashboard.
Picture a Monday in late October with the schedule full, the phones busy and a crew that hasn't had a rain day in two weeks. It feels like a great month, and it may be one, but you can't tell from the yard whether the last five tear-offs made money or whether three insurance checks are still sitting out there. That's what the weekly numbers are for, and the rest of this post walks through each one and how to get it.
Which numbers should a roofing owner look at every week?
The numbers worth a weekly look are the ones that can still change what you do this month: cash, receivables, backlog, job margin, leads, close rate and installer productivity. Your profit and loss statement and balance sheet still matter, but they come monthly and they look backward, so they're better for checking the trend than for steering the week.
Roofing trade writers have recommended this for years. Back in 2012, Ken Kelly laid out a weekly flash report in Roofing Contractor's "Knowing Your Numbers" that tracked cash balances, receivables and payables, weekly production and sales, jobs on the books and marketing goals. More recently, Roofing Contractor's August 2026 piece on business health quotes Marcos Sierra, CEO of The Sierra Group, who recommends reviewing reports weekly, with some key metrics tracked daily through a dashboard. Here's the list I'd start with:
Cash in the bank and what you'll owe in the next two weeks.
Accounts receivable, sorted by how many days each invoice has been open.
Jobs on the books, in dollars and in weeks of crew time.
Gross margin on each job you closed this week.
New leads, broken out by where they came from.
How quickly someone responded to each new lead.
Close rate and revenue per installer, looked at as a running trend.
What's a healthy gross margin and net profit for a roofer?
The roofing figures most often quoted come from that same 2012 Roofing Contractor article, which puts typical gross profit between 20% and 40% and says overhead expenses run "between 20 percent and 40 percent of revenue on average." It also cites an NRCA figure that the average roofing company's profit was 2.8%, and it calls 5% good and 8% excellent. Those numbers are more than a decade old, so treat them as a rough frame rather than a target, and lean on your own trend more than anyone's average.
The ranges are wide because the work is different. The article notes that service-heavy companies can run higher gross margins, while new construction and large commercial work tend to run lower, which is why comparing your margin to another roofer's tells you less than comparing this month's jobs to last month's.
How to check margin each week
For every job you finished this week, write down what you billed, then subtract what you spent on materials, labor, subs, dump fees and permits. Divide what's left by what you billed, and that's the job's gross margin. If one job came in well under the rest, write a short note on why, such as "two extra sheets of decking" or "an extra day for weather," because those notes are where the fixes come from. If you want to go deeper on tagging those costs to each job in the first place, our roofing page talks about why roofing margins so often look better on the estimate than at the end of the job.
How do I measure backlog and jobs on the books?
Backlog is the dollar value of signed work you haven't done yet. The Associated Builders and Contractors, which publishes a national backlog indicator, defines it in its methodology as "the amount of work, measured in dollars, that construction companies are contracted to do in the future," and it converts that into months by comparing backlog to revenue.
You can do a simpler version every Monday. Add up the contract value of every signed job that isn't finished, then divide it by what your crews typically install in a week. The answer is weeks of work on the books, and it tells you whether to push sales, hold prices or start lining up help.
That number matters even more here in Salem and across the Pacific Northwest, where the wet months shorten the roofing calendar. Five weeks of backlog in July and five weeks in November aren't the same thing, so it's worth noting how many workable days the forecast gives you next to the backlog itself.
Which sales and marketing numbers matter most?
The sales numbers that matter most are where your leads come from, what each one costs, how fast someone answers and how many turn into signed jobs. Roofing Contractor's June 2026 article on marketing metrics lists qualified leads, leads by source, cost per lead, referrals, repeat customers and response time, and it notes that "Response time directly affects conversion rates, customer satisfaction."
By hand, this is a simple log. Every lead gets a line with the date and time it came in, where it came from, when someone first responded and whether it became a signed job. After a month, you can see which sources bring jobs and which only bring phone calls, and how many leads waited until the next morning for an answer.
Your close rate is signed jobs divided by estimates given, and it's most useful split by lead source. I haven't found a published roofing close rate benchmark that I'd trust, so the number to beat is your own from last quarter.
What is revenue per installer, and why does it matter?
Revenue per installer is your total revenue divided by the number of installers, and it tells you how much work each person in the field is producing. In NRCA's Professional Roofing, Jared Ribble writes that NRCA workshop findings put average revenue per installer at $230,000 to $300,000 a year, and he makes the case that training new installers sooner raises that number faster.
It's an annual figure, so don't expect it to move week to week. What you can watch weekly is the input behind it: squares installed per crew day, callbacks and days lost to rework. When those slip, revenue per installer will follow a few months later.
How do I build a one-page weekly report without new software?
You can build it in a spreadsheet with one tab per week and the same seven lines on each tab. The manual way works fine for a long time if one person owns it and fills it in by the same time every Monday.
Here's a simple way to set it up:
Pull cash and the receivables aging from your accounting software, along with any bills due in the next 14 days.
List every signed, unfinished job with its contract value, and divide the total by your typical weekly install.
Write down billed amount and actual costs for each job closed last week, and figure the margin.
Copy the week's leads from your lead log, with source, response time and outcome.
Update close rate by source and squares installed per crew day.
The tool way comes later. Once you know which numbers you actually use, check whether your roofing software or accounting system can report them for you, and you'll know exactly what a dashboard needs to show. Our KPI dashboard page covers what goes into building one that pulls from the systems you already have, and if collections are the line that keeps turning red, the accounts receivable page is a good next read.
Questions owners ask
How often should I look at my P&L?
Look at it monthly, once the books are closed, and use it to check the trend. The weekly numbers in this post are what you steer by between those monthly looks.
What is a good close rate for roofing?
There isn't a published benchmark I'd rely on, so start by measuring your own close rate by lead source for a few months. The goal is for your best sources to stay strong and for the weak ones to either improve or lose their budget.
What is revenue per installer and why does it matter?
It's total revenue divided by the number of installers, and NRCA workshop findings put the average at $230,000 to $300,000 a year. It shows whether you're getting full value from the crew you already have before you hire more.
Do I need roofing software to track this?
No, a spreadsheet and 30 minutes on Monday morning will do it at first. Software makes it faster once you know which numbers you rely on, and it's easier to set up well when you already know what you want it to show.
So go back to that busy Monday in October. With the seven numbers in front of you, you'd know whether those tear-offs made money, which insurance checks to chase and how many weeks of work you've got before the rain sets in, and you'd know it before the month was over.
If you'd like to see where your numbers and everything else in the company actually run through you, the free Foundation Inspection follows a job from the moment a lead comes in to the moment the money's in your bank and asks who owns each step along the way. It takes about an hour with no paperwork in front of you, and it shows you which handoffs would free up the most of your week.
I'm Tim Volner, and I run Sentric Group in Salem, Oregon, where I work with contractors who've built a solid company but have reached the point where it can't seem to run for a single day without them.