Roofing & Construction Job Costing System

A roofing and construction contractor was pricing jobs using manual measurements and spreadsheet calculations for square footage, material waste, and labor — a process that was slow, error-prone, and made it hard to keep commission calculations consistent across a growing crew of salespeople.

We built an MS Access application, driven heavily by VBA, that automates the parts of the estimating process most prone to human error. A square-footage and waste calculator estimates material waste from job input parameters. Comprehensive labor and material sheets capture labor hours, material quantities, rates, and additional costs, then run the calculations to derive total job costs automatically. A dynamic pricing engine adapts to changes in labor and material costs over time, so estimators are never quoting off stale numbers.

The system also handles the business side of job execution: a commission calculator computes what each salesperson earns per job, factoring in project size and complexity, and a summary sheet consolidates every job's key metrics — costs, square footage, waste, and pricing — into one printable view alongside detailed labor/material breakdowns and commission sheets. What used to be a manual, spreadsheet-heavy estimating process became a consistent, repeatable system that prices jobs accurately and pays commissions fairly.