The tool, in your browser
The comp cost sheet
Two numbers off your own declarations page — the premium before your mod, and your mod — and this page shows what your claim history is adding to the bill and what a better mod would be worth in dollars. Under that: a log of every comp claim, with a flag on any open one nobody has chased in ninety days, and the number you actually price labor with — what comp adds to every dollar of wages.
Free, and it asks for nothing. No email, no account, no sign-up. What you type stays in this browser on this device.
Read this first
This sheet only knows about this browser. Nothing you type is sent to us and nothing syncs, so the phone and the office computer each keep their own copy — and anyone who opens this page on that computer can read your payroll, your premium and every man on the claim log by name. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. A claim log is a record that has to last: put the-comp-cost-sheet.xlsx on the computer at the office and keep the real one there.
The sheet fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
Which number goes where
The roofing share and the blended share are not interchangeable
Office payroll is rated far lower than roof work, so it drags the blended figure down. In the sheet’s own example the roofing code lands at 35% of wages while the whole shop blends to 29.49%. Put the blended one into a crew’s labor cost and you have quietly under-priced every roof you sell. Use the roofing row’s own share for crew wages; the blended number is for overhead.
That roofing share is what the crew-model sheet in Module 12, Play 1 — your crew or his asks for in its workers’-comp row. Type it across yourself. These tools don’t read each other on purpose: on paper you copy a number between two sheets and you can see what you copied.
The sheet multiplies; it does not rate. Premium × mod is the arithmetic your declarations page already does. How your mod itself gets built — what years it looks at, how a claim’s reserve feeds it, what counts as average in your class — is set by your state’s rating bureau and your carrier, and it is not the same everywhere. Ask your agent to walk you through your own worksheet; don’t take a rule of thumb from a spreadsheet.
How it gets used
- Pull your declarations page. The premium the mod applies to goes in the first box, your mod in the second. If you can’t find either one, that’s the call to your agent this week.
- Read what the mod itself is adding. That is the number to carry into your next bid conversation — and into the one with your agent.
- Put every claim in the log, open and closed: date, man, claim number, the reserve your carrier shows, and the last date you actually asked the adjuster about it. The reserve is their number, not your guess.
- Once a quarter, work the log top to bottom with your agent. Anything flagged ASK AGAIN is a claim nobody has chased in ninety days — and an open claim that sits is what builds the mod at the top of this page.
- Then do the payroll block, one row per class code, and take the roofing row’s share to your crew pricing. That is the number an hour of roof work really costs you.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-comp-cost-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — three tabs, same formulas, same ninety-day flag — for the computer at the office. Six differences in the page’s favour: the mod is typed once here and feeds both halves, where the file has it in two cells (B7 and B12) that nothing keeps in step, so a new mod typed into one tab leaves a true bill beside a false labor rate; there’s no row-24 ceiling on the claim log (a claim typed below it in the file looks fine on screen and is in none of the counts); the example numbers are placeholder text here, so there’s nothing to delete before you start; a box holding something that isn’t a number says which box it is, where the file just leaves the cell blank and lets the total come out short; a last-asked date that isn’t a date flags ASK AGAIN instead of taking the whole row’s flag down with it; and a claim starts with no status rather than Open, so a row you haven’t filled in isn’t counted as an open claim. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so a claim log survives a cleared browser and can be handed to your agent, and it prints the red flags for the meeting. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M11-03 The Number That Prices Every Bid You Send — is where the mod, the claim log and the payroll share come from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.