Roofing Chart of Accounts: A Complete Template for Roofing Contractors

Roofing books fail in a specific way. The default small-business chart of accounts has one Sales account and one Materials account, and a roofing company sells at least four different things at four different margins, pays most of its labor to sub crews per square, and collects a meaningful share of its revenue from insurance carriers on a clock it does not control. Blend all of that into two accounts and the P&L reports one number that is the average of businesses that have nothing in common.

This is a working chart of accounts for a roofing contractor, account by account, with the reason each one exists.

Free download: Roofing chart of accounts template (CSV), the structure in this guide as 57 numbered accounts with types, subtypes, and a one-line note on why each exists. Imports into QuickBooks Online, Xero, and most accounting software. No email required.

Why the default template fails roofers

Three things are true of roofing that are not true of a generic service business.

Sub crews are the biggest cost. Most residential roofers pay crews per square, not per hour on payroll. That is a direct job cost, and in the default template it lands in operating expenses where it never touches gross margin.

A large share of revenue is insurance work, which arrives as an initial claim, then supplements, then a depreciation holdback that pays on completion. Booked as plain sales, you cannot see your claims mix, your supplement rate, or how much the carriers owe you.

Money arrives before the work. Deposits, and on commercial jobs retainage in both directions. Booked as revenue the day they land, your months are wrong and a cancelled job leaves income on the books for a roof that was never installed.

Income accounts

The split that matters most is insurance claim revenue from supplement revenue. Supplements are the number that decides whether storm work paid. A shop that runs a 15 percent supplement rate and a shop that runs 35 percent are different businesses, and one income account hides which one you are.

Cost of goods sold

COGS is for costs that vary with the job. In roofing that list is longer than most shops think.

Two of these change how your margins look the moment you add them. Dumpsters and haul-off can run several hundred dollars a job and almost every roofer has them in operating expenses, which quietly inflates every job's margin by that amount. And financing fees on a dealer-financed roof are a cost of that roof, not a bank fee; a financed job that looked like a 40 percent job may have been 33 once the fee is where it belongs.

Balance sheet accounts roofers are missing

The deposits account is the one to set up today. A deposit is a liability until the job is done, and it is released to revenue on completion. If a job cancels, the deposit is refunded or forfeited as a recorded decision, not silently left in income.

Operating expenses

Standard, with two roofing-specific splits: sales commissions apart from office salaries, so you can see cost per closed job, and canvassing and lead fees apart from general marketing, so you can see cost per lead. Workers' compensation gets its own line because in roofing it is a large fixed cost worth watching on its own.

Setting it up without breaking your history

1. Change at a period boundary, the start of a quarter or year.
2. Rename before you create. If "Sales" becomes "Replacement revenue, residential," renaming keeps the history. Creating a new account splits it.
3. Merge rather than delete. Deleting an account with transactions either fails or orphans data.
4. Map old to new in writing before you touch anything, so you can restate the prior year.
5. Tell whoever codes transactions. If your crew leads pick categories on supply-house runs, they need the new list.

And if you use bank rules to keep the new accounts filled, write them narrowly and check quarterly what they actually caught. A rule that files every supply-house charge to shingles will file the underlayment and the dumpster there too. What that costs is a post of its own.

What good looks like

Once the structure is right, your P&L answers these without a spreadsheet:

• What was replacement gross margin last month, residential and commercial separately?
• What was our supplement rate on insurance work, and what does the carrier still owe us?
• What did haul-off cost as a share of replacement revenue?
• What did callbacks cost, and which crews generated them?
• What is our cost per closed job, commissions included, and cost per lead?

If your books cannot answer those, the chart of accounts is the problem, not the bookkeeper. Once it can, the next step is per-job costing, so those numbers exist for each roof and not just the month.

The roofing chart of accounts template (CSV) has all 57 accounts numbered and ready to import. For the HVAC and plumbing versions, see the HVAC chart of accounts and plumbing chart of accounts.

*Written by Austin Semple, a former controller: three years in audit, seven running the books for small businesses, and the founder of Poof. Poof holds customer deposits as a liability and releases them on completion, costs financing fees to the job that carried them, and closes the books within five business days or the next month is free. Start a 30-day trial, no card required.*