The tool, in your browser
The takeoff sheet
Measure the roof plane by plane, flat, from the ground — the page adds the pitch itself. Set your own waste factor, your material cost a square, your crew’s hours a square and your dump rate once, and every roof after that gives you squares to order, bundles, crew hours, and the three dollar figures a price is built on: materials, labor and dump.
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 in the truck and the computer at the shop each keep their own copy — and anyone who opens this page on that computer can read what your material costs you and what you pay your crew. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. It holds one roof at a time: the next takeoff types over this one. For the copy that has to last, put the-takeoff-sheet.xlsx on the computer at the shop and save a file per job.
The takeoff fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
Where these numbers go
Carry materials, labor and dump to the job cost sheet
Those three bold figures are three of the four cost boxes on the job cost sheet, which turns a cost into a price that actually keeps your margin. Type them 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, and nothing here quietly changes a price on a page you aren’t looking at.
The fourth box is overhead, and a takeoff can’t know it. Your trucks, your insurance and your office are your monthly nut divided by the jobs you run in an average month — that’s yours to set over there. Leave it blank and you’re pricing to cover materials and labor only, and eating the rest out of what you thought was profit.
The crew-hours figure doesn’t go to the job cost sheet at all. It goes to your foreman before he starts, and to the schedule — it’s what tells you whether this is a one-day roof or a two-day roof, and whether the price you’re about to give has a second day of labor in it.
How it gets used
- Set your shop’s numbers once a season, not once a job. Waste, bundles a square, your material cost a square, your crew’s hours, your loaded labor rate and your dump rate. The faint numbers in the boxes are one owner’s example, not an industry figure — pull yours off your own supplier invoices, your own timesheets and your own disposal tickets.
- Measure flat, on the ground, and let the page add the pitch. Length and width drip edge to drip edge, then the rise — the 6 in a 6/12. A length taped up the slope gets the pitch counted twice and you over-order by a truckload. A triangle goes in as half its base by its depth.
- Do the edges. Starter, drip edge, ridge cap, valley metal and ice-and-water are sold by the foot, never by the square. Skip that block and your material number is short on every roof you bid.
- Order off “squares to order”, never off bare squares. That’s the line with your waste in it, and bundles are rounded up because you can’t buy part of a bundle.
- Then carry the three dollar figures to the job cost sheet. A takeoff tells you what a roof costs. It does not tell you what to charge.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-takeoff-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — same pitch factors, same waste rule, same edge block, same three figures at the bottom — for the computer at the shop. Four differences in the page’s favour: a box holding something that isn’t a number says which box it is, where the file just leaves the cell blank; a plane with a measurement missing is named, where the file drops the row without a word; a box you haven’t filled in yet is named too, instead of a total quietly coming out short; and the pitch factor is worked out from the rise you type, so a 7½ pitch or a 14/12 is a number rather than a lookup table that stops at 12. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so it keeps a saved takeoff per job and survives a cleared browser, and it prints for the folder and the truck. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M10-01 Count the Squares Before You Price the Roof — is where the pitch factors and the waste rule come from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.