About Roof Genius

Our business hours 9:00 AM to 11:00 PM Pacific Time, Monday thru Saturday. We answer emails usually within an hour and never more than 4 hours. You will not see any irritating popup window advertisements on this website. You will never receive unsolicited email from RoofGenius.

I am a former roofing contractor and i am the owner of this website. I have been in the roofing business for 41 years. 24 years as a shingler and 17 years as a roofing contractor all in California.
I started shingling when i was 14 after school and on the weekends. We nailed on wood shingles by throwing a handfull of 3 penny nails in our mouth.
We were given a roll of metal and made all of our step shingles, chimney flashings and any other flashings we needed.
How things were then is a whole another story. I will post some of those stories when i get time. I can remember some really neat inventions (Liftbed trucks, nail strippers).

My business philosophy was this: Do everything to code, use the best materials, do not cheat anyone, if we say we are going do something, do it and if we have a problem get it taken care of. At my tops I had 35 roofers, 2 secretaries, 2 estimators, 1 dispatcher, 2 liftbed trucks and 3 forklifts. We did mostly steep work with shakes, comp and some tile. We did about 80% new work.

Some of the general contractors i had we did all their work for the entire 17 years i was in business My job then was mostly ordering materials, collecting money, measuring plans and watching over everybody. I called it quits in 1996 after almost every roof changed to concrete tile and i did not learn Spanish in high school.

Computers

I bought a business program and 3 computers in about 1988 Not realizing how difficult computer programs are to learn i thought i could get my secretary to learn it and show me how. Wrong.

This program had the following modules; Job Cost, Payroll, Accounts receivable, Accounts payable, Inventory, Spreadsheet Interface and General Ledger. With me working after hours in about a month we finally got it to print payroll checks. In about 6 months everything else. This program did everything except estimating, so i developed an estimating program written in Lotus 123. This program made estimating a cinch.

A contractor could walk into my office with a set of plans and leave in 15 minutes with a written proposal. People used to tell me i should sell the program. I still have the program, but people would to have Lotus 123 on their computers to use it.

This brings me to the software on this site. In about March 2000 i was searching the internet looking at estimating programs and found many that would work. I noticed after studying them i found they were not easy to use ( i been down that road) and you could not try them first. Some were so packed with features, that in finally finding out how to use a particular feature if you don’t use it often you have to figure it out all over again.
So i decided to write the RoofCalcWriter program. The goal of the RoofCalcWriter program: Easy. What does easy mean? Easy simply means use it, not figure out how to use it.
The development process is ongoing with accuracy and easy in mind.