The tool, in your browser
The material margin sheet
One row per closed job: the shingle squares and price you bid, the squares and price the invoices say you bought, and whatever was left on the pallet. The card splits the miss three ways — you paid more per square (price), you put more on the roof than you bid (the roof ate it), or you bought squares that never went up (dead stock) — and the three add up to the whole miss, to the penny. The box names the biggest of the three and the play that fixes it.
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 every job and every price on it. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. Keep the-material-margin-sheet.xlsx on the computer at the office if a season of jobs has 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.
What the three numbers mean
Three leaks, three different fixes.
Price is every square you bought, times the difference between what you paid and what you bid. A minus here means the branch charged you less than you quoted. The fix is locking the price before she signs. The roof ate it is the squares that went on the roof over what you bid, at your bid price — a takeoff miss, and the fix is the waste you cut off. Dead stock is the squares still on the pallet, at the price you bid them — the fix is one man orders and count the load.
What the leftover actually cost is a different number on purpose: the pallet at the price you paid, less what the branch credited back. Dead stock is the bid’s share of the miss; this one is the cash the pallet took out of the bank. The box picks the biggest of the three by size, sign ignored, so a price you beat by $500 still reads as the biggest thing that happened on the material line.
How it gets used
- Squares bid, with waste, off The Takeoff Sheet you priced the job from.
- Price bid is the shingle price off the written quote. Not the takeoff’s material cell — that one carries underlayment, ice-and-water and nails, and it will make every job look like a price miss.
- Squares bought is every square the invoices billed, before any return. The return goes in the credit box. Net the two out and the pallet vanishes from the sheet, which is the one thing it exists to show.
- Read the headline at the money meeting. One of three plays. If the same one comes up three months running, that’s the fix for the season.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-material-margin-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — same columns, same split, same headline — for the computer at the office. The big difference: the file refuses to print any answer while one row doesn’t line up, because a cell can’t say which row. This page can, so it says what’s wrong under the box, leaves that job out of the totals, and grades the rest. Three smaller ones in the page’s favour: no row-26 ceiling, the example rows are placeholder text with nothing to delete, and a minus can’t be typed at all. One the other way: the file is a real file, so a season survives a cleared browser and prints for the meeting. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M15-02 The Material Line Missed — Which of Three Things Did It? — is where the sheet comes from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.