Software

CompanyCam management for roofing contractors

Everything this desk works with was pointed at something by a person standing on a roof. That person made every decision that matters.

What the office does with what the field sends

Sorting, first. Images arriving from several people across several jobs get attached to the right one, which sounds automatic and is not once two crews are on neighbouring addresses for the same customer.

Tagging follows, to whatever vocabulary the company has agreed, so an archive answers questions instead of merely holding pictures. And assembly: the set that goes to a homeowner, the set attached to a claim file, the set that shows a completed elevation in an order a stranger can follow. Plus the unwelcome half — noting which jobs came back with nothing usable, which is information rather than a complaint.

The capture happens where we are not

Every other system this brand works in receives what the office types into it. This one receives what somebody else decided to point a phone at, and that inverts where the useful work sits.

A photograph carries only what was in frame. Whoever took it made a series of judgements — which elevation, how close, whether to include something for scale, whether the thing they had just noticed was worth recording at all — and none of those judgements is visible afterwards. The archive shows what was captured. It cannot show what was considered and skipped, or what nobody looked at.

The desk has no remedy for that. There is no version of this work where the office decides a set is thin and improves it, because improving it means being on the roof. Every other function this brand runs has some recovery available — a document can be chased, a figure can be checked against a source, an entry can be corrected. Here the input is final on arrival.

So the honest work splits in two. Make the most of what arrives: file it, tag it, assemble it so it can be used without a phone call. And report what did not arrive, specifically and without blame, because a thin set can only be fixed on the next job, by the person who will be holding the phone.

What working inside CompanyCam looks like, and where its edges are A diagram of one bounded region representing your companycam instance. Above it, a capsule states the single thing that crosses inward — a member invitation you send from the account — and an arrow carries it through one opening in the boundary. Within the region, three horizontal bands name routines that run there concurrently: photographs filed to the job they belong to, tags that mean the same thing across crews, and galleries a reader can follow without asking. A darker sealed band, drawn inside the same boundary rather than beneath it, names what never crosses back out: your photographs and where they were taken, and the project structure crews rely on. Nothing in the diagram leaves the enclosure. It shows structure only and contains no figures. WHAT YOU GRANT A member invitation you send from theaccount Your CompanyCam instance Photographs filed to the job they belong to Tags that mean the same thing across crews Galleries a reader can follow without asking NEVER LEAVES THIS INSTANCE Your photographs and where they were takenThe project structure crews rely on
One way in, nothing out. The work happens inside a boundary you own, under a permission you granted and can withdraw, so that the office can use what the field captured without making a phone call. The sealed band is drawn inside the boundary on purpose — it is not a limit on what we do, it is a statement about what does not move.

Effortless to capture, harder to make usable

The capture side is close to frictionless, which is the point and the reason crews actually use it. Images land attached to a job and a place without anybody filing anything, and that alone removes the commonest failure — photographs that exist on a phone and nowhere else.

What arrives, though, is volume rather than an account. A job with hundreds of images and no structure is not obviously better than one with thirty, and is often worse to work with: the useful frames are in there somewhere, and finding them costs more than the photographs saved.

The judgement left to a person is what a set needs to demonstrate. That differs by job type and by who will read it, it is not derivable from the images themselves, and it is the thing an outside desk has to be told rather than left to infer.

Your account, your images, your structure

A member invitation you send, at the access you choose. Not a shared login. Photographs are evidence about somebody’s property, and knowing who handled a set is part of what makes it usable.

Nothing is downloaded into a system of ours. No second library, no copies at our end to secure or return.

The project structure and tags stay yours. We will propose a vocabulary and apply whatever you settle on. What the photographs are for is your decision, not the desk’s.

Roofing Back Office is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by any software vendor named on this site. All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Agreeing what a complete set looks like

The first piece of work is a short definition, per job type, of what needs to be shown. Not an aspiration — a list a crew can satisfy in a few minutes and an office can check against without a discussion.

A look back over recent jobs against that definition comes second. The result is usually uncomfortable and always specific: certain job types are covered well, certain crews reliably send what is needed, and there is generally one category nobody has ever documented properly because nobody asked.

The rest is routine — filing, tagging, assembling, and a standing note of the gaps. The gap list is the part with a future in it, because it is the only output that changes what arrives next month.

What owners ask about crew photography

Can you make the crews take better photographs?

Not directly, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise — nobody at a desk is on the roof. What a desk can do is make the gap visible: report which jobs came back thin, which tags are never used, which crew consistently sends what the office needs. Feedback that arrives with specifics changes behaviour; a general request to take more photos does not.

What does the office actually do with them?

Files them against the job they belong to, applies the tags your company agreed, and assembles them into something a reader can follow — a set for a customer, a set for a claim file, a set that shows a completed elevation. Raw volume is not the deliverable; a sequence somebody can understand without ringing the crew is.

Our tagging is inconsistent. Is that worth fixing?

It is usually the highest-value thing available here. Tags are how a set of photographs becomes searchable, and inconsistent tagging produces an archive that technically contains the answer and cannot surface it. Agreeing a small vocabulary and applying it without improvising is unglamorous and it is what makes the rest work.

Do you handle sharing with homeowners or adjusters?

Within the scope you set and in your company name. Assembling and sending a set is administration; deciding what a set demonstrates is a judgement about the job, and where that judgement has consequences it stays with you and whoever is qualified to make it.

What if a job has no usable photographs at all?

It gets reported as such rather than padded. A set assembled from whatever happens to exist, presented as though it were complete, is worse than an honest gap — somebody downstream will treat it as the record. The useful output is a plain note that this job was not documented, which is also the only thing that changes anything next time.

If we take this in-house, what carries over?

The tag vocabulary, the filing convention, and a written note of which crews and job types reliably produce a usable set. The account and every image were always yours. What transfers is the agreement about what the photographs are for, which is the part nobody writes down.

Every platform we work in.

Pick a finished job and try to tell its story

Using only what is in the account, in order, to somebody who was not there. Wherever you have to explain, the set is not doing the work.