The tool, in your browser
The crew-model sheet
One card per job, priced twice: your own crew on payroll against a sub crew doing the same scope. Wages, payroll taxes, workers’ comp, the paid hours the job never got and your own time on one side; his price per square, what his price doesn’t cover and your own time on the other. Both totals get divided by the squares, because cost per square is the only line that compares them honestly.
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 wages, your comp share and what every job cost you. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. Keep the-crew-model-sheet.xlsx on the computer at the office if these numbers have to last.
The sheet fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
Why the two columns don’t match
They aren’t the same six lines twice — and that’s the point.
Taxes and comp have no twin on the sub side. That one line is the whole difference between the two models, and it’s the number most men guess at. Get payroll taxes off a real payroll run and comp off your own policy — your roofing class code’s own share, never the blended shop figure, which office payroll drags down. The comp-cost sheet works that share out for you. Type them the way you say them — 11 and 30, not 0.11 and 0.30. Type a share above 100% and the card refuses to name a winner at all, which is it telling you a decimal slipped.
Your own hours are usually HIGHER on the sub side, not zero. The checkpoints, his paper, chasing his invoice — running a sub crew is not free either, and a zero in that box is the single quickest way to make this sheet lie to you. In the example it’s six hours against five. And the callback line goes on both sides honestly: whatever rework you can’t get back from the crew that caused it is yours, which is what the backcharge play is about.
Expect it closer than the argument in your head. In the example the two columns land about eight dollars a square apart — under four percent of the job, either way. Move the comp share seven points and it flips. It’s a number that swings, not a philosophy, which is why the box up top holds several jobs: run it on two or three before you believe either column.
How it gets used
- Pick a job you already ran — closed out and paid. Real squares off the takeoff, real hours off the timesheets. Not the nightmare job, not the dream job.
- Set what an hour of your own time is worth once, at the top. Your hour, not a wage — what you’d sell an hour for. It prices your time on every job on the page. Leave it empty and the sheet still totals, but it’s pricing your time at nothing, and it says so.
- Fill your own crew’s side. Crew-hours tear-off to cleanup, average wage, your two shares, then the hours the job never got on their own line — rain, windshield time, the supply house — so nothing is counted twice.
- Fill the sub side for the same scope, then read cost per square and nothing else. Not his hourly rate, not his invoice. Then add a second job and a third: one job is one job.
The sheet’s own last word
This decides cost. It does not decide classification.
Keep the two questions separate. This tells you what each model costs. It does not tell you which model you are allowed to use — that is set by federal and state rules and by how the work actually gets run, not by which column came in cheaper. Before you move a crew from one column to the other, put it to your own accountant or attorney. Get the paper right before he rolls: the sub agreement.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-crew-model-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — same lines, same formulas, same answer block — for the computer at the office. Three differences in the page’s favour: the file prices one job per copy, where this holds as many as you want to run and adds up both columns across them; words typed into a money box are said out loud here, where the file reads them as nothing and quietly comes out short; and two of the file’s own answer cells carry rounding noise from the same sums (it saves $234.05 as 234.049999999999), where this lands on the cent. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so it survives a cleared browser and prints for the meeting with your accountant — and its column D says where every number comes from, right beside the box. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M12-01 Your Crew Or His, Priced On One Real Job — is where the sheet comes from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.