Sell a Start Date You Can Actually Hit

On the list of fires: “the start date you can keep”

Module 14 · Running the Schedule · Play 5 of 6

The problem in one breath

You said "two weeks" in her driveway because two weeks is what you always say. Five weeks later her shingles are still at the supply house, she has left three messages with your office, and the review she writes is about the date, not the roof.

Why it happens

Nobody in the shop knows how much roof it can put on in a week. Not you, not the office, not the foremen. So the date doesn't come off a number, it comes off the pressure in the driveway — her other bid is sitting on the counter, and "couple of weeks" keeps you in it.

Then it walks. Every job that runs long shoves the ones behind it, and nobody tells them. You didn't oversell one roof — you oversold the month, one driveway at a time.

The play

Count the work, count what's sold, divide, and sell the week the math hands you.

Count what the shop can do in a week, in squares. A 21-square ranch and a 55-square four-unit aren't the same week's work. Per crew: squares it lays in a working day, times the days a week it really rolls. Not five — three or four, once rain, the dump run and the job that wasn't ready come out. Take out the days you hold back for the rain-day list (Module 14, Play 3) and for the quiet weeks too.
Count the backlog the same way. Every sold job in squares off the takeoff (Module 10, Play 1), never off its dollars. Split it ready or waiting. Ready here means ready to schedule — material, approval, deposit, homeowner — not cleared to roll tomorrow. Name what each waiting job waits on: the carrier hasn't approved the scope, she hasn't picked a color. A bid you haven't sold isn't on this list.
Divide, and take what you get. Ready squares ÷ squares a week = the weeks you're out. In the sheet's example, three crews do 101 squares a week against 215 ready squares: 2.1 weeks out, 3.3 if everything waiting frees up. Arithmetic, not a feeling.
Sell the week, not the day. "We start the week of the fourteenth; the day gets set the Thursday before." A week survives one rain day; a day doesn't. Then the ten-day board sets the day (Module 14, Play 1) and the roll list confirms it the afternoon before (Module 14, Play 2).
Keep crew time you never sell. Half a week is a fine place to start. It covers the callback, the rot found at two o'clock (Module 6, Play 17) and the week a storm eats. Sell every hour you own and one bad week turns into six angry homeowners.
Past what your market will wait, you get three levers, and they're math. Buy the overflow from a company that roofs (Module 12, Play 1). Sell the honest week and let the impatient walk. Or add a crew on the numbers (Module 1, Play 8). Shaving the date because you're nervous is not a fourth lever.
Tell her where she sits in line — and hold the line. The week goes on the page she signs (Module 6, Play 18). New work goes on the back of that line. Jumping it — your own roof, a storm, a week a salesman promised — is a decision with one name on it, usually yours, and whoever jumps tells the hand that writes the board. Everybody it pushed hears the new week from your office that day, not from an empty drive at seven. People forgive a moved week; they don't forgive finding out alone.

Do this this week

Twenty minutes with the sheet. Your crews in the top block off what they really did last month, every sold job in the middle with a Y or an N. Read the one number at the bottom — then say it out loud on the next roof you sell.

The tool

Get the sheet

Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice. Grab it on the phone now — it’ll be waiting on the computer at the shop.

the-booked-out-sheet.xlsx — the booked-out sheet, one page, three blocks: your crews, what's sold, and the answer. Every yellow cell is an example; type over it. You type today's date yourself — the sheet won't read your calendar, so a page you handed out last week can't quietly change itself. Out comes THE WEEK YOU CAN PROMISE, as a Monday. Leave the crews empty, or miss a Y or an N, and it says so in words instead of handing you a number. the sheet notes below walks the rest.

If your crew is 1099

A sub company's crew is booked on somebody else's board too, so his week isn't yours until he says it out loud. Don't stack his squares in the top block with your own and sell off the total. Get the week into the job ticket (Module 12, Play 2) before you promise it, and count a week he never confirmed as a week you don't have.

M14-05 · Sell a Start Date You Can Actually Hit — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/scheduling-dispatch/the-start-date-you-can-keep

The sheet notes

How the sheet works — the columns and the formulas

The columns, the formulas behind them, and the judgment calls — so you can rebuild it by hand if you ever need to.

What it does

Turns the start date you say out loud into arithmetic. Block A adds up how much roof your shop can put on in a week, in squares. Block B adds up how much roof you have already sold, split into what can roll and what is stuck. Block C divides one by the other and hands you a Monday — the week you can promise the next homeowner without lying to her.

One worksheet, "Booked Out". The yellow cells are an example — three crews and ten sold jobs — so you can watch it run before you type your own numbers over it. Gray cells and the two green answer cells work themselves out; don't type in those.

How to use it

Block A, one row per crew. Squares that crew lays in a working day, and the days a week it really gets on a roof. The days you type are the days that crew is genuinely on a sold roof — the days you hold back for the rain-day list and for the quiet weeks come out before you type them, or out of the buffer in row 33. Never count them twice. Four rows, so there is room for a fourth crew; a crew you have not hired yet does not go on here. Row 10 adds them up — that is the number everything below divides by.
Block B, one row per SOLD job. Squares off the takeoff, never off the job's dollars. A bid you have not sold does not belong on this list.
Answer the ready column with Y or N and nothing else. There's a drop-down on it in Excel, which turns a typed answer away. Numbers has no drop-down, so there it is on you. Y means the job is ready to be SCHEDULED: material, approval, deposit, homeowner, all clear. It does not mean the job is cleared to roll tomorrow — that is the roll list's call, run the afternoon before, and it is a harder test. N means you can't put a week on it yet, and the next column is where you write what it's waiting on.
Type today's date in B34. The sheet does not read your calendar on purpose — a date that moves by itself makes the printout you handed somebody last week lie.
Set your buffer in B33. Crew time you never sell. Half a week is a starting point, not a rule.
Read row 38. That's the Monday you can promise. Row 39 is the Monday if every waiting job frees up — tell her that one only when you believe it, and beat it.

The lines

Row	What it is
5	Block A header. Squares a day · days a week it rolls · squares a week · where the number comes from.
6–9	One crew per row. Four rows; three are filled in the example. Column D is auto.
10	SHOP SQUARES A WEEK. Auto: the four crew rows added. The example lands on 101.
12	Block B header. Job / address · squares · Ready? (Y/N) · what it's waiting on.
13–24	Twelve job rows; the example fills ten. Squares show a decimal on purpose — the takeoff sheet hands you 28.39, not 28, and a column that hid the fraction while the totals counted it would look like it can't add. Rows 23 and 24 are left open. Need more? Insert them inside the block, above row 24, so the boxes below still reach them.
25	Squares READY to schedule. Auto: the squares on the Y rows. Example: 215.
26	Squares WAITING. Auto: the squares on the N rows. Example: 117.
27	Jobs on this list. Auto: how many rows have a job on them. Example: 10.
28	Rows that don't line up. Auto: rows with a job on them and no Y or N, plus rows with squares typed and no name. Anything but a 0 and the answer cells below refuse to print until you fix it.
30	Block C header.
31	Weeks out on the ready work. Auto: ready squares ÷ shop squares a week. Example: 2.1.
32	Weeks out if everything waiting frees up. Auto. Example: 3.3.
33	Buffer weeks you keep back. Yours. Example: 0.5. A negative number here counts as none.
34	Today's date. You type it.
35	Weeks you can promise. Auto: row 31 plus the buffer, rounded up to a whole week. Example: 3. Says "Answer every Y/N first" while row 28 is off.
36	The same for the everything-frees-up case. Example: 4.
38	THE WEEK YOU CAN PROMISE — the Monday of the week row 35 lands in. Example: 2026-08-31.
39	The Monday for the everything-frees-up case. Example: 2026-09-07.
41–44	The sheet's own last word: where squares a day comes from, what it does not know, and what it does when you leave things blank or answer a job wrong.

Formulas (so you can rebuild it by hand)

Squares a week (D6, copied down through D9): =IF(OR($B6<=0,$C6<=0),"",$B6*$C6)
Shop squares a week (D10): =SUM(D6:D9)
Squares ready (B25): =SUMIF($C$13:$C$24,"Y",$B$13:$B$24)
Squares waiting (B26): =SUMIF($C$13:$C$24,"N",$B$13:$B$24)
Jobs on the list (B27): =COUNTA($A$13:$A$24)
Rows that don't line up (B28): =COUNTIFS($A$13:$A$24,"<>",$C$13:$C$24,"<>Y",$C$13:$C$24,"<>N") +COUNTIFS($A$13:$A$24,"",$B$13:$B$24,">0",$C$13:$C$24,"<>Y",$C$13:$C$24,"<>N") It counts the two kinds of bad row and adds them. It never subtracts one from the other — a count that can go down is a count that can cancel two mistakes into a clean 0.
Weeks out, ready work (B31): =IF($D$10<=0,"Fill in your crews",$B$25/$D$10)
Weeks out, everything (B32): =IF($D$10<=0,"Fill in your crews",($B$25+$B$26)/$D$10)
Weeks you can promise (B35): =IF($D$10<=0,"Fill in your crews",IF($B$28<>0,"Answer every Y/N first",ROUNDUP($B$31+MAX(0,$B$33),0)))
The same, everything case (B36): identical, with $B$32 in place of $B$31.
The week you can promise (B38): =IF($D$10<=0,"Fill in your crews",IF($B$28<>0,"Answer every Y/N first",IF(OR(NOT(ISNUMBER($B$34)),$B$34<40000),"Type today's date",$B$34+7*$B$35-WEEKDAY($B$34+7*$B$35,3))))
The same, everything case (B39): identical, with $B$36 in place of $B$35.

WEEKDAY(d,3) counts Monday as 0, so subtracting it from a date walks back to that week's Monday. The three guards run in order — crews, then row 28, then the date — and each one tests a value, not whether a cell looks empty. $B$34<40000 is the date floor: 40000 is a date back in 2009, so anything smaller is a typo, not a day. MAX(0,$B$33) stops a buffer typed as a negative from running the promise week backwards. Only IF, OR, NOT, ISNUMBER, MAX, SUM, SUMIF, COUNTA, COUNTIFS, ROUNDUP and WEEKDAY are used — no helper columns, nothing hidden — so it opens and computes in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice.

Notes and judgment calls

Squares a day is not invented, and it is not a book number. Men on the crew × the hours they are actually on the roof ÷ crew-hours a square. Crew-hours a square is the pair Module 10, Play 4 teaches you to pull off your own timesheets and Module 10, Play 1's takeoff sheet holds: 1.75 hours to lay a square and 0.75 to strip one layer, which is 2.5 on a one-layer tear-off. That is the divisor behind every crew row in the example — Ruiz, 5 men × 7 hours ÷ 2.5 = 14 squares a day; Delgado, 4 × 7 ÷ 2.5 = 11.2, written down as 11; Núñez, a 2-man repair pair that drives more than it roofs, 2 × 5 ÷ 2.5 = 4. Same two rates the crew-model sheet in Module 12 prices a two-layer job with, so the two sheets don't argue with each other. 2.5 is a ONE-LAYER tear-off; two layers is 3.25, and a backlog full of them takes the example from 101 squares a week to about 78 — 2.8 weeks out instead of 2.1, a full week later on the promise. Row 42 says so on the sheet.
Seven hours, not eight or ten. That's hours with boots on the roof. The drive, the supply house, the dump run, setup and cleanup are already out of it. Put a ten-hour day in there and the sheet will hand you a start date you cannot hit, which is the thing it exists to stop.
Days a week is the other half of the honesty. The example runs 4, 3 and 3 — not five. Rain, the dump run, the job that wasn't ready and punch-list days are already gone, and so are the days that crew is not on a sold roof: the repairs held back for a no-go morning, the small work banked for the quiet weeks. Take those out here or out of the buffer, not both. A three-crew shop at 101 squares a week comes out 2.1 weeks out on ready work and 3.3 with everything, which is a real number and an uncomfortable one.
It counts squares, not jobs, on purpose. Ten jobs tells you nothing. In the example those ten run from 21 squares to 55, and the 55 is a four-unit building.
The ready column is the whole sheet. SUMIF only counts a cell that says Y or a cell that says N, so a pasted "Yes" or a row nobody ever answered would quietly vanish out of both boxes — and it always vanishes the same direction, making you look sooner than you are. The drop-down turns a typed answer away in Excel, but a paste walks straight past it, which is why row 28 and the guard on the answer cells both exist. Try it: paste "Yes" over 406 Larkspur Ln's Y and clear the answer on 77 Ridgeline Ct. Row 25 drops from 215 to 154, row 28 reads 2, and the four answer cells stop printing a week and say "Answer every Y/N first" instead of handing you a smaller number with a straight face. It catches the quieter one too: squares typed on a row with no name and no answer — 40 squares of sold work that would otherwise never reach either box, and always in the direction that makes you look sooner than you are.
Blank cells never print a confident wrong answer. No crews and all six answer cells say "Fill in your crews" — no error, no zero. No date and the two Monday cells say "Type today's date", and so does a bare 5 typed where a date goes, which would otherwise read as a day in 1900. A buffer typed as a negative counts as none instead of walking the promise week backwards. The guards test the value, not whether the cell looks empty, because a SUM of nothing returns 0 and would sail straight through a blank-check.
Crews filled in and nothing sold reads as next Monday, and that's correct. Weeks out is 0, but the buffer still applies, and half a week rounds up to one. Clear the buffer as well and it reads the Monday of the week you're standing in. Row 43 says so on the sheet.
What it does NOT know. Which crew can do which roof — that's the crew card in Module 14, Play 4, and a sheet that says you're three weeks out is no help if the only crew who can walk a 12/12 is the one that's busy. It doesn't know a cut-up roof from a walkable one. It doesn't know layers: the 2.5 behind every crew row is one layer, so a backlog of two-layer tear-offs is slower than this sheet thinks. Squares a day is an average across your mix, so re-read it off the timesheets every month and again whenever you add or lose a man. It adds your crews into one shop number, so it can't see that the 55-square job in the example won't split three ways. It doesn't set the day — the ten-day board in Module 14, Play 1 does that, and the roll list confirms it the afternoon before. It holds no crew but yours: a sub company's week isn't yours until he says it out loud. And it is not a money sheet; it says nothing about whether the work in Block B is priced right.
The sheet ships with its numbers already saved in it, so a phone preview shows real figures; they recalculate the moment you type.

The one thing

Do this this week

Take it with you

Get the sheet

One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.

Same fire

You're booked out and every homeowner wants a start date

M14-05the start date you can keep — you’re here

All the fires →

Fixed this?

When the honest start date keeps sliding, the question underneath it is whether you need another crew or a tighter board.

The fire right behind it is usually You're turning work away but you can't tell if you can afford another crew.