Industries · Roofing
Accounting & Tax for Roofing Contractors
Your revenue spikes with the weather, your books should never blow off course.
Roofing in South Florida is a feast-or-famine trade. A single storm can triple your pipeline overnight, then permitting delays, adjuster negotiations, and material backorders stretch collections out for months. Between hurricane seasons, competition on re-roofs and tile work compresses margins across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. A roofing company that thrives here needs financial systems built for volatility, not the flat-line assumptions a generic bookkeeper works from.
The money problems are specific. Insurance-funded jobs create receivables that behave nothing like a normal invoice, supplements, depreciation holdbacks, and mortgage-company endorsements all delay cash. Deposits collected before permits pull your revenue recognition forward if they are booked wrong. Crews shift between W-2 and sub arrangements, workers' comp premiums in roofing are among the steepest in construction, and material prices swing between the bid date and the install date.
Integris Accounting brings genuine trade-contractor fluency to roofing companies. We build per-job costing that separates retail, insurance, and new-construction work, structure your chart of accounts around crews and material classes, and plan cash reserves so slow winters never threaten payroll. Founder Edgar Gomez has spent two decades around construction finances, and that shows in how quickly we understand your operation, in English or Spanish.
The landscape
5,000+
roofing contractors operating across Florida
6
months of Atlantic hurricane season, June through November
3
counties of roof stock we help contractors serve profitably
The challenges
What makes roofing accounting hard
Insurance receivables that drag for months
Between initial claim payments, recoverable depreciation, and supplement approvals, insurance jobs pay in fragments. Without tracking each slice separately, you cannot tell which jobs are actually collected and which are quietly bleeding.
Storm booms that mask weak margins
When volume triples after a hurricane, sloppy pricing and crew overruns hide inside big deposits. When the surge fades, companies discover they grew revenue while shrinking profit, and the tax bill on the boom year still arrives.
Punishing workers' comp and labor costs
Roofing carries some of the highest comp rates of any trade. Misclassified crews, unreported overtime, or payroll that does not match certificates can trigger audits and premium true-ups that wipe out a season of profit.
Customer deposits booked as income
Collecting 30 to 50 percent up front feels great until deposits get recorded as revenue before a single shingle is installed, overstating profit, distorting taxes, and hiding the liability you owe in labor and materials.
Our approach
How we help
Job costing split by revenue type
Retail re-roofs, insurance restoration, and builder contracts each get their own margin tracking, so you know which line of work deserves your next crew and which is subsidizing the others.
Insurance claim receivable tracking
We set up your books to follow every claim through ACV payment, supplements, and recoverable depreciation, giving you an honest picture of collectible cash instead of one inflated receivable balance.
Storm-season cash and tax planning
Surge-year income gets managed with equipment timing, retirement contributions, and estimated payments sized to reality, so the IRS does not take the windfall your slow season was counting on.
Deposit and deferred revenue discipline
Customer deposits sit as liabilities until work is performed, keeping your profit statements truthful, your sales tax exposure clean, and your year-end tax position defensible.
Payroll built for roofing crews
Through ADP we run compliant payroll with proper class codes, keep sub agreements and COIs documented, and prepare you for the workers' comp audits that always come in this trade.
FAQ
Roofing accounting, common questions
How should I handle the big deposits I collect before starting a roof?
Book them as customer deposits, a liability, not as revenue. Income should be recognized as the work is performed or completed, depending on your method. Getting this right keeps your financials honest, prevents you from paying tax on money you still owe in labor and materials, and protects you if a permit falls through and the deposit has to be refunded.
A hurricane year doubled my income. How do I avoid a brutal tax bill?
Start planning before year-end, not at filing time. Options include accelerating equipment purchases under Section 179, funding a retirement plan, prepaying deductible expenses, evaluating your entity structure, and recalibrating estimated payments. A surge year is also the moment to build reserves for the slow seasons that follow. We model the scenarios in the fall so the choice is yours, not the calendar's.
Should my crews be W-2 employees or 1099 subcontractors?
The answer depends on control, not preference. Crews you schedule, supervise, and equip generally belong on W-2 payroll, while true subs carry their own licenses, insurance, and other customers. Roofing is heavily audited on this exact issue in Florida. We review your crew arrangements, document what legitimately qualifies, and set up payroll so a comp audit or IRS inquiry finds order instead of exposure.
Can you help me understand which jobs actually make money?
Yes, that is the core of what we build. We structure your books so labor, materials, dump fees, and permit costs post to individual jobs, then report margin by job type each month. Most roofers who see real job-level numbers for the first time discover their assumptions about insurance versus retail work were wrong, and reprice accordingly.
Where we serve roofing
Talk to a CPA who knows roofing
Before the next storm season hits, get your books and tax plan storm-proofed, call (305) 497-0552.