How to Invoice After Full Replacement Roofing Work

Short answer: How to invoice after full replacement roofing: bill squares of actual roof surface plane by plane, after the pitch multiplier — about 1.054 at 4/12, 1.118 at 6/12, 1.202 at 8/12, 1.414 at 12/12 — never off the footprint. Then add the counted items: layers torn off, deck sheets replaced, ice barrier and drip edge by the linear foot, boots and flashings each, and dump tonnage. Collect the balance the day the dumpster leaves.

A full replacement is the one roofing job where the invoice is a completely different document from the estimate. The estimate guessed at what was under the shingles; the invoice reports what was actually there. Everything below is about closing that gap in a way a homeowner, an adjuster, or a mortgage loss-draft department can all follow. The universal fields are in what to include on an invoice.

Where do the squares on the final invoice come from?

From a plane-by-plane measurement with each plane’s own pitch factor applied, not from one multiplier over the whole outline. A square is 100 ft² of actual roof surface, and roofs are rarely one slope.

Plane	Footprint ft²	Pitch	Factor	Actual ft²	Squares
Main gable, both slopes	1,180	6/12	1.118	1,319	13.2
Attached garage	460	4/12	1.054	485	4.9
Dormer and porch	190	8/12	1.202	228	2.3
Total	1,830	—	—	2,032	20.3

Billing that roof off its 1,830 ft² footprint prices 18.3 squares instead of 20.3 — two squares of shingles, underlayment, labor, and disposal handed over free. On a steeper mix the gap gets wider fast, which is why the corrected square count belongs printed on the invoice rather than living in your head.

Cross-check it against material before it goes out. Standard three-tab and architectural shingles run three bundles to the square, so 20.3 squares plus a 10 percent waste allowance is about 67 bundles. If 78 bundles came off the truck and none went back for credit, either the measurement is short or the waste on this geometry is higher than you assumed. Find out which before the customer does.

What are the lines, and what unit is each one in?

A full replacement invoice is mostly counted items, not area. Squares carry the field of the roof; almost everything that makes the roof watertight is measured in linear feet or in units.

Line	Unit	Where the quantity comes from
Tear-off, priced per layer	Squares × layers	Layer count seen at tear-off, not the estimate’s guess
Shingles installed	Squares	Corrected area plus waste, reconciled to bundles delivered
Underlayment	Squares or rolls	Delivery ticket
Ice and water barrier	Linear feet of eave, plus valleys	Measured eave run and valley run
Starter course	Linear feet of eave and rake	Measured
Ridge cap	Linear feet of ridge and hip	Measured
Ridge vent	Linear feet	Measured ridge, less any unvented section
Drip edge	Linear feet of eave and rake, by profile	Measured
Valley metal or closed-cut valley	Linear feet	Measured
Step and counter flashing	Linear feet of wall intersection, stated as new or reused	Counted on the roof
Pipe boots and roof vents	Each	Counted
Chimney flashing and cricket	Each	Counted
Skylight flashing kit or unit	Each	Counted
Deck replacement	Per sheet, installed	Photographed count before the sheets were covered
Fascia or rake board	Linear feet	Measured
Disposal	Loads and tons	Dump ticket
Permit and inspection	Actual cost	Permit card
Warranty registration	Each	Product line and install date

Two lines carry most of the disputes. Layers, because each existing layer is a separate pass of tear-off labor and a separate share of the dumpster, and a homeowner reading “tear-off, 20.3 squares” has no way of knowing it was done twice. And deck replacement, because it is the only line nobody could price honestly beforehand. Both are cheap to defend and expensive to leave vague.

Disposal deserves its own habit. Divide the tonnage on your dump tickets by the squares and layers torn off, across a season of jobs, and you end up with your own weight-per-square for the products you actually install. That number beats any published figure, because it already contains your local landfill’s rate structure and the shingle lines your supplier stocks.

What changed between the estimate and the invoice?

Something always did — the estimate was written from the ground and from an attic hatch. Show each change as its own dated line rather than folding it into the square price.

What was found	What it added
A second layer under the first	A full extra tear-off pass and roughly double the disposal weight. It also removes the option to re-cover: the IRC does not permit a roof recover where the existing roof has two or more applications of any covering
Soft or delaminated sheathing	Deck sheets at the conditional unit price, counted and photographed in place
Rotted fascia at the eave	Board replacement by the linear foot, plus drip edge that could not be reused
Ice barrier required further up the slope	Code-driven. IRC R905.1.2 calls for the barrier to run from the lowest roof edge to at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line in ice-dam areas, which on a deep overhang is a second course
Bathroom fan venting into the attic	A vent termination and a labor line, and a note in the file
Chimney with no cricket	A built cricket and new counter flashing, each
A skylight that could not be reflashed	Unit replacement rather than a flash kit
Insurance supplement approved mid-job	Bill to the approved supplement line for line, not to the original scope

Each line gets the date, the quantity, and how it was authorized — a text, an email, a signature. “Deck, 11 sheets, photographed and confirmed by text 6/14” reads as accounting. The same eleven sheets absorbed into a higher per-square number reads as a price increase.

What do I hand over before asking for the balance?

The physical close-out is part of the invoice in this trade, because the homeowner cannot inspect the product they just bought.

• Photos by plane, before and after, taken from the same position. Add the tear-off shots of every bad deck sheet with something in frame for scale.
• An attic photo showing the underside dry and the new ventilation path.
• The magnet sweep, run more than once, across the driveway, the lawn, and the beds. Say out loud that you did it. Nails in a tire three weeks later is the fastest way a paid job becomes an unpaid one.
• Gutters cleared of nails and granules.
• The permit close-out, in whatever form your jurisdiction takes it. Some require an on-site final inspection; others have replaced it with documentation. Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, closes a residential re-roof permit on geo-tagged photographic documentation instead of an inspector visit — exposed sheathing before re-covering, underlayment with the nailing pattern and the material packaging, drip edge with visible nailing, and shingles showing the wind rating on the wrapper. Those photos have to be taken during the job, not recreated after it, which is the whole argument for shooting each phase as you go.
• Manufacturer warranty registration, which usually has to be filed within the manufacturer’s own window and needs the product line, the install date, and the accessories used. An enhanced warranty that was never registered is a warranty the homeowner does not have.
• Written care notes: what voids the warranty, who to call, and what your workmanship term covers.

How does the balance actually get collected?

On a retail replacement, ask for it the day the dumpster is hauled, standing in the driveway with the photos on your screen. The roof is finished, the yard is clean, and nothing about the job is more persuasive than it is at that moment. Build the invoice on the phone and let them scan the payment QR code before you pull out. If they pay on the spot, hand over a receipt rather than a second copy of the invoice — invoice vs receipt explains why those are different documents.

On insurance work the balance is a different animal. What is usually outstanding at completion is the deductible plus recoverable depreciation, and the depreciation is released only after the carrier receives a completion invoice. That means your invoice has to be itemized to match the carrier’s scope, and it may also need to go to the mortgage company’s loss-draft department, since claim checks are frequently made out jointly. Send it the same day and follow it. When the balance stalls anyway, the sequence is in roofing customer won’t pay.

Did the square price actually hold?

The invoice is the only honest audit of the estimate, and a full replacement gives you five numbers to check while the job is still fresh.

Check	Compare	What it tells you
Squares billed vs squares bid	Final measurement against the estimate	Whether the pitch factor got applied to every plane, including the low-slope porch
Bundles used vs bundles ordered	Delivery ticket against returns	Your real waste factor on a cut-up hip versus a plain gable
Crew hours vs squares	Timesheets, tear-off and lay counted separately	Your true production rate, per layer and per pitch
Dump tonnage vs layers	Dump tickets	Your disposal cost per layer-square
Deck sheets vs the allowance	Photo count	Whether the conditional line is priced where it needs to be

Feed those back into the next estimate, and get the profit arithmetic right when you do. Markup and margin are not the same operation. A replacement that costs you $9,600 all-in and gets a 22 percent markup prices at $11,712, of which $2,112 is profit — an 18 percent margin, not 22. To actually hold 22 percent, divide the cost by 0.78 and price at $12,308. That $596 is one job. Across a season of re-roofs it is a crew truck.

Published per-square ranges are only a sanity check, and a loose one. They move with region, pitch, layer count, shingle line, landfill rates, and how hard the last hail season hit your market. If your own build-up lands far from a range you trust, look for the reason inside your numbers instead of editing the price to match somebody else’s.

What has to survive after the check clears?

The measured squares by plane, the delivery and dump tickets, the deck photo set, the change confirmations, the permit and inspection record, the warranty registration, and the numbered invoice — held together under one job name rather than scattered across a camera roll and a glovebox.

Keel is an iOS app that keeps that file on the phone, entirely on the device: no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label reading Data Not Collected. Standing in the driveway you build the final invoice in about a minute with your own numbering, logo, and brand color, the corrected square count and every counted line on it, and the payment link rendered as a QR code the homeowner scans off your screen. Supply house tickets, dump tickets, and the permit receipt get photographed and read on-device by Apple Intelligence, so the cost behind a disputed line has paper attached. Drives between the yard, the supply house, and the job get logged as mileage, which in a trade measured in windshield time is real money. The ledger is append-only and hash-chained, so a sent invoice cannot quietly change. Year end exports as one file, or as the Accountant Pack: a CSV plus a one-page summary PDF. Free is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 lifetime purchase rather than a subscription. You can get it on the App Store. The much shorter version of the same file, for a patch call, is in how to invoice after repair roofing work.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate the squares to put on a roof replacement invoice?

Measure each plane’s footprint, multiply each by that plane’s own pitch factor to get actual surface, add them, and divide by 100. The factor is about 1.054 at 4/12, 1.118 at 6/12, 1.202 at 8/12, and 1.414 at 12/12. Billing off the building footprint underbills the roof by roughly 5 to 40 percent depending on slope, and it is the most expensive arithmetic error in the trade.

Should tear-off be a separate line from installation?

Yes, and it should be priced per layer. Each existing layer is another full pass of removal labor and another share of the dumpster weight. A single line reading “tear-off and install” gives a homeowner no way to see that a second layer was found, which makes the extra cost look like a price increase rather than an extra day of work.

How do I bill decking I could not see before tear-off?

At the conditional unit price the estimate already carried — a stated rate per sheet, installed — with the count proven by photographs of each bad sheet in place before it was covered. Text the count to the homeowner the day it happens. That turns the final conversation into a question about how many sheets, which the pictures answer, rather than a question about the price.

When should I collect the balance on a roof replacement?

The day the dumpster leaves, in the driveway, with the photos on your screen and the payment QR code on the invoice. Insurance work is the exception: what remains is usually the deductible plus recoverable depreciation, and the depreciation releases only after the carrier gets an itemized completion invoice, which may also have to reach the mortgage company’s loss-draft department.

What does a roofer hand over at completion besides the invoice?

Before-and-after photos by plane, the tear-off shots of replaced deck sheets, an attic photo, the final inspection where one applies, and the manufacturer warranty registration filed inside its window with the product line and install date. Add written care notes and a magnet sweep you actually performed more than once. An unregistered enhanced warranty is a warranty the homeowner does not have.

Does the invoice have to match the insurance estimate line for line?

On a claim, yes. The carrier reads your invoice as a comparison document, so anything supplemental — extra squares from a corrected pitch measurement, a second layer, code-required ice barrier, drip edge — has to appear as its own line matching the approved supplement rather than being folded into a larger square price. Unmatched lines are the usual reason a completion payment sits.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.