Wanna Get Paid Faster? Make It Easier for Homeowners

Pete: All right, welcome everybody to the Roofr Masterclass. I am your host, Pete McKendrick, back with another masterclass here this week. And, my co-host Nic, still out. If you guys don't know, Nic had a baby, so congrats to Nic and Clarissa, and, hopefully he'll be back here soon, but enjoying some time home with the baby.

Excited to have my stand-in co-host today Gabby. So welcome, Gabby.  

Gabby: Hey, everyone.  

Pete: So, Gabby is our resident finance, everything financial expert at Roofr.

Oversees our, our financial team, and so I'll, I'll let, Gabby intro herself a bit here. And then, we'll dive into today's topic a little bit.

Gabby: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Gabby. I run our fintech team, so that's, our invoicing, payment, and QuickBooks integrations. I hope to live up to the, finance master that Pete has sold me out to be. Happy and excited to demo what we've been working on and hear some feedback from all of you.

Pete: Yeah. Awesome. Like Gabby said, we're trying to talk about payments today and some of the new stuff that her team's been working on, so excited to dive into that. You guys can always get in touch with me, as well as Joel in the background.

Joel's manning our, our chat as always. Our masterclasses are always posted afterwards on our website at roofr.com/masterclass, or on our YouTube channel. So if you guys wanna go back and check out any past episodes, we have all those on there.

So let's dive into it, Gabby, right? Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the journey of invoices here at Roofr.  

Gabby: Yeah. So I just wanted to give everyone kind of like a, we'll call it a thousand foot view of- ... you know, where we started at Roofr and where we are today. So back in 2023 when Roofr was kind of just starting out as our CRM, branching out from just measurements and proposals, we built out our first invoices and payments platform.

So that's when we actually launched, was at the beginning of 2023. And since then we've made a couple of major enhancements, whether it's, you know, integrating into our proposals tool, having some automations with our customers' CRMs. We launched the QuickBooks integration.

What I'm gonna be demoing today is invoicing, payments, and schedules, as well as deposits on proposals. But before I get into kind of those demos, I would kinda just love to know from the people who are attending today if you're currently using Roofr to take payments or who do you use to take payments from your customers today?

Pete: Yeah, this is a great question because, even recently, you know, Gabby, you and I went o- to an on-site with a company and the second day I was there we were talking a lot about payments and they are a payment user and they were saying like, "Oh, well 90% of our our payments still come in through check."

We're in a very interesting time right now in this industry where we're seeing like an evolution, right? Like customers that we're getting now are a little bit more inclined to, pay via a roof ... like through a payment portal.

My boys play basketball. They did a camp over the summer and literally the camp you had to sign them up for the camp by mailing in a check and I said, "This is crazy.

Who in the world in 2026 still has checks?" Right? Like, I don't even have checks. I couldn't even write a check so I had to actually pay them in person. We're kind of evolving into this timeframe where people don't necessarily have checks as much as they used to.

I think we're seeing more and more people like texting invoices and taking payments that way and stuff, so I think the timing of this is really good. It's kind of like the future of, or the near future I guess, of our, of our industry as a whole.

Gabby: Yeah, and I think just adding on to, what Pete said, like a big goal for my team and Roofr in general is just to make your lives easier. How can we make it faster for you to take those payments and follow up on them so that way, if it is paper checks that you are going to be collecting, how do you keep track of them?

How do you make sure that your customers are paying you on time? Because, I've seen a lot of users and a lot of roofing contractors, they have reminders in Google Calendar or they'll set up Slack reminders, and it's just a bunch of disparate systems. Whereas what we're hoping to build within Roofr is, one system, one, one source of truth so that you or, you know, anyone at your company can really take charge of that payment collection process.

Pete: Yeah. You know, it's funny, I remember talking to a contractor that said every Friday is check collection day at their company, and they drive around to all the people that owe them money and literally, like, knock on the door and ask for a check. And so they try to, you know, ride around and collect checks, and they spend the entire day.

Like, it's essentially an entire wasted day of, like, their sales reps' time trying to collect checks from jobs that they've completed.

So let's talk a little bit about what you guys have added here recently.

Gabby: Yeah. So payment schedules are, you know, what some of you might think of as payment terms.

Is a big pain point for a lot of customers because it's something that you put in the, terms and conditions of your proposals. But it's not necessarily easy to follow up on or track within Roofr or a lot of other invoicing tools and platform. So what we've done, which I'm gonna demo in just a second, is giving you the ability to pre-create all of those payment schedules within your invoices, set, payment amounts, the reasons, and their due dates.

And that way, in theory, hopefully in the near term, it'll be kind of a set it and forget it type of thing, where you can set it up on your invoices and then it'll just run through Roofr. You can come in and remind your customers really easily. So with that being said, I'm gonna jump into my demo,

Setting up a payment schedule is hopefully very simple. So I'll come into a job here, and I'll go ahead and click Create Invoice. After an invoice is created, I'm gonna go in and add in just a bunch of fake details. Let's call it, roof replacement for $15,000.

And now at the bottom of your screen, you'll see this payment section. And so I'll be able to come in here and say payment request, let's say 10%. And I'll click save. And you'll see this is gonna automatically do that math for you. And I'll say for a deposit. And the due date is a week from today. And then I can come in and add an additional payment request, and this will also be a percentage one, let's say 30%.

And again, it's gonna do the math for you on material delivery. And I expect that to happen the following week. And then at the very, very end, I can say remainder. And so this will be the remaining balance of the invoice, and that'll happen at job completion. And you don't have to select a due date. We know that a lot of the times, like, these schedules are very up in the air.

You don't know, when the materials, materials are gonna be delivered or when your crew is gonna be available. So you can always leave this blank and then o- and come back and fill it in later. And then from here you can send it out to your customers. But before I do that, I'm just gonna quickly show you what happens if you were to change this invoice.

Let's say the customer wanted to add an additional scope of work, or there was a change order along the way before work even begins. Let's change this to $18,000, and I'll click save And you'll see that all of these payment amounts automatically updated. And so I'm gonna go ahead and send this to my customer, and I'll say invoice and payment schedule And I'll just say, "Hey Gabby, here's your invoice," with some typos And click send invoice.

And this will get sent over to your customer the same way as it does today. And I do wanna call out that this is a feature that we built regardless of Roofr payments. So even if you are manually collecting checks or if you're, you know, based in Florida and checks rule as king this is not tied to Roofr payments.

We wanted to deliver the most value as possible to all of our customers, not just those that are going to be processing through Roofr payments. So I'm gonna come into my inbox, and you'll see invoice and payment schedule, and I'll click view invoice. And this is what your customers are going to see. So one of the great benefits is that now it's all living on one invoice.

You're not having to generate three different invoices, one for $1,800, one for 15-... $5,400, and one for $10,800 at the very end. They can kinda do everything and review everything from right here on this page. If you did have Roofr payments, they would have the option to process directly from this link. I don't have it set up in this account just because I am demoing this live.

It would actively charge my credit card $1,800, which is not something that I'm able to do at this exact moment. But regardless, I'll come in here and just show you what it looks like if you were to record a manual payment. So I can say they gave me a check. I can say check number 100, just as an example, and I'll click save.

And you'll see that the status of this payment request has automatically been updated to paid, it just makes it much clearer from here. And then also on your customer's page, if they were to refu- refresh it, they would also see paid. So it kinda keeps everything all in sync without you having to, email them a bunch of times or, update in QuickBooks, update in Roofr, update in a, a different payment processor.

Again, our goal is to just kinda streamline this whole process for you. And then the other thing that I wanted to just quickly demo is, let's say this was something that was past due. So this happened last week. Now you'll see that my payment status is in past due. And as I mentioned before, I have heard fr- from a lot of users that keeping track of these payment requests is very difficult especially if you're going to be using multiple platforms or processing payments in multiple places.

So now you can come into here and see pending requests, and you'll see all of the payment requests that you've created on those schedules, as well as their due dates. So you can see here that the, I have three that are in past due. And now I can just click resend and then, send a reminder to all of my customers.

So I will be up front. We don't currently have automations built out just yet for payment schedules. It's something that we're going to be working on very early in 2027, where you can, you know, send automatic reminders three days prior to when their payment is due or a day after it moves into a past due status.

But until then, we did wanna make sure that it was easy for you to find these payments. So you can come into the pending requests and see all of your past due payments or sort by, you know, anything within this table, and then just kinda click through and resend those payment requests.  

Pete: This is great because a lot of the contractors that I've talked to in the past are doing this, around deposits, right? Like, they take a deposit at the beginning of the job, or, you know, if maybe you're, you're doing multiple trades on a job and you finish one trade, you wanna process that piece of the invoice, right?

So you wanna get paid for that, that portion of it, essentially, like, percentage of completion payments. Now you have the ability to set all this up, and I love that it stays all on one invoice because traditionally, like, even in some of the other, places that I've been, other CRMs that I've been on, you had to create multiple invoices and then kind of, like, try to bring them all together, and it can get kinda messy from an accounting standpoint when you've got one job that's got four invoices on it, right?

So yeah, this is really cool. I like the way you guys did this.  

Gabby: Yeah. And I do see a question about, you know, availability in Canada. I'll just call out that everything that I demoed today is available to all of our users regardless of location. Roofr Payments is just available in the US for now.

We are looking into expanding into Canada, but I don't have a great timeline on that. But the payment schedule functionality that I just demoed is available in both US and Canada.  

Pete: Cool. Yeah, I know that comes up quite often.

Oh, it's an interesting question here too Gabby, from, about Zelle, right? When will Zelle payments be in the payment dropdown list? You only have ACH, and that's different from Zelle.  

Gabby: It's something that is relatively easy for us to add, but it is one thing that we wanted to survey, so I guess our users, because, while we're updating that list, we might as well make a big update and update it with as many other payment methods that our users are asking for.

It's in the hands of another one of our product managers to add Zelle to the list. We're just trying to take our time and figure out what other things we should add at the same time. But hopefully pretty soon, I would say.  

Pete: Yeah, and I think here y- k- you kinda see the results here that we were talking about, right?

75% of our folks are still grabbing a check, right? So you think of the time involved in chasing that down, right? Or them mailing it to you. Like I said, I think, I do think we're in kind of a, a time of transition. You know, you have a different buyer here. Yeah. I agree, Sabrina. I think it, a lot of it is the age of the client right now, and that's starting to change a bit.

And as we see the younger homeowners, you know, reroofing their houses, that maybe we'll see a transition to digital payment processing away from the, the physical check.

Gabby: Yeah. And I guess also a follow-up question to that poll, that I'd love to hear people's thoughts in the comments. So most of our users they end up emailing and soon to be texting their invoices to collect those payments. But in some, previous roles I've seen that they often, or the businesses themselves prefer, in-person payments.

I'm physically with you. While I'm here, why don't we just take that, like pay by a credit card or pay by ACH. So I'd be curious to know if there's a reason why we prefer email or text links versus while you're physically with the homeowner trying to capture the payment right then and there.

Pete: Yeah. I think Christian even just said it's easier to grab money from somebody in person, right, than it is to potentially have to hunt them down later or rely on them to use a link. I think it just literally just depends on your customer base and what they prefer at this point. So one of the things obviously that payment schedules are gonna help with specifically is deposits, right?

Deposits on, you know, When we get a proposal signed, we have so many customers that ask us like, "I want to be able to take a deposit at that point, you know, a small percentage, whatever it is, just to lock that customer in." And, you guys have, essentially addressed that as well, have, have you not?

Gabby: So I can go ahead and jump into my next demo. And so, this demo just a heads up, this is something that we are actively working on. We are in like maybe the final, I'm gonna say four or so days of development and testing, and so we are looking to open up this beta, to our users.

So if you're interested in joining, reach out to Pete, Nic, Joel, myself anyone at Roofr, they can point you in my direction. So you can see here I'm looking at a proposal, and you'll now see this request online deposit payment.

When you click this, you'll be able to select whether it's a percentage versus a dollar amount. So I'm gonna stick with the percentage for now and click Save. And you'll see that there's a deposit due of 10%. Similar to the payment schedules, we aren't requiring a due date because, again, you don't always get to control that.

Customers are going to be needing time to review the proposal. They're not always going to be ready to sign it right then and there on the spot. But it's something that we're looking into to be able to add that due date or tie it to when the proposal was signed. So we could say, you know, it's due seven days after your proposal was signed, or 14 days after your proposal was signed.

And then from here I'll click send. At the very bottom, you'll also be able to see a preview of the deposit itself. If you are going to be passing on any platform fees to your customers, we are going to just remind you here and show a preview here that the ACH platform fee, this is a demo, it should say half a percent with a $40 max, or credit card would be 2.8% with 30 cent transaction fee.

So exactly as we have it on the invoice, it's also gonna be reflected on the proposal. And again, our goal here is consistency with your customers and also your internal employees. Very little training needs to be done because it looks exactly the same as the invoice. Then I'll go ahead and click send, and it'll go over and send over to your customer.

And so from your customer's point of view, they'll see those options presented, and they'll be able to, you know, select one of these three options. And then similar to invoicing, if it was multi-select or if they were changing the dollar amount, this deposit would automatically calculate and recalculate based off of what your customer has selected.

So in this case it's 16,000. But I'll go ahead and click finish. And once the proposal is signed, they'll see the option to pay their deposit. So one thing that we did wanna make sure was very clear to both you as well as your customers, a deposit cannot be connect- collected until after the proposal is signed.

And we did build this in tandem with the proposals team, so If you have a co-signer it will have to go through the entirety of the proposal signature process, so the primary customer as well as the co-signer needs to sign prior to collecting a deposit. If you do have a co-signer, again, we built it with the proposals team in tandem.

So you'll get a notification saying, "Hey, the co-signer has finished signatures. Deposit is ready to be collected." And the initial person who signed the proposal will also get a reminder saying, "Hey, the proposal has been signed. You are now able to go and collect a deposit or go and pay your deposit." So once they get that e- email, or if it's just, you know, a single co-signer or a single signer, they'll click pay with credit card, they'll process everything as usual, pay now, and you'll see that the payment is successful.

Then from here we did also wanna make sure that it was, again, easy to track. That's our, our goal here is minimize the amount of paper that you're having to track down or follow along. So on the proposal list view, you'll be able to see the status of the proposal and whether or not the deposit has been paid.

So here you can see that there's a pending deposit of 75,000, but this one, there's a $1,000 deposit paid And then kind of the final piece that ties everything, everything together is getting that proposal into the invoice. So we built this directly on top of what we are already doing today, where if you have a one proposal, you can create an invoice directly off of that.

So I'll come in here, I'll click create an invoice. I'll select the options, and then here you can s- you can choose whether or not you want to allocate that deposit to the invoice. If I were to go ahead and do that, that'll automatically add it to the invoice, and you'll see the amount is pre-filled.

The reason is going to be deposit, the status is paid, and then the due date and p- payment date are gonna copy over from that proposal. So if you think of it from, like, again, that 1,000-foot view of, you know, what is the goal of Roofr payments, what is the goal of Roofr invoicing, it's to kind of just make things as easy as possible for you.

So with the, release of payment schedules, able to manage these much more easily and keep an eye on them, send reminders to your customers. And now with deposits on proposals, you can kind of start building that trust with your customers and building that process with your customers up front by having them sign the proposal through Roofr, having them provide payment through Roofr, and then you convert that to an invoice.

It looks very similar to what they saw on the proposal. All of the meshing is the same, and you can come in and continue to build out the rest of your payment schedule through the adding payment requests workflow. So everything is hopefully, you know, one single ecosystem where you don't feel like you have to jump in between Roofr and a, and a bunch of other platforms. It's not tied to just one particular Roofr subscription.

As long as you have full access to our CRM, you'll have access to Roofr payments and payment schedules.  

Pete: I think the, the biggest thing with this is, like you said it's made the whole flow seamless, right? Like now I can go from taking that deposit on the proposal, which we get asked for so much, to just simply pushing it to the invoice which allows me to do the rest of the payment schedule.  

You said a couple more days you guys will have it hopefully tied up, right? Yeah.  

Gabby: Yeah, so I would say we are going-  

Pete: And then that will be beta, correct?

Gabby: Yeah.  

Pete: You guys will be going into beta. Yeah.  

Gabby: Yeah, we'll be launching this as a closed beta to start. And so I would say, like, those requests, anyone that wants to join, you can start reaching out to me now. And then the actual, date of that- ... is a little bit, up in the air. We wanna make sure that everything is working properly.

You know, this is real dollars being transacted. We wanna make sure that everything is, super airtight. But hopefully within the next two weeks we have our first couple of beta users running deposits through proposals.  

Pete: I think that you guys have done a ton of work on this, and, the way it ties to the rest of the product just works really, really well, right?

Like you said, the whole idea of this is to make things easier on the contractor, and I think, being able to now go from proposal through all of these steps so easily and effortlessly is, you know, obviously a huge plus to using Roofr.

Gabby, do you wanna take a couple minutes to talk about some of the other stuff that you guys are currently working on?  

Gabby: So you know, even though we've come a pretty long way, at least in my opinion, since 2023 on invoicing and payments, we understand that there's still a lot more to do.

So what's coming up next is automations. We know that automations are the backbone of a well-run roofing business, and so we do wanna build on top of what I demoed today to be able to send those reminders to your customers, make sure that payments never fall through the cracks. Whether or not you're on Roofr Payments there's still a ton of benefit to be had on generating invoices and sending those reminders to your customers. And then the next two are kind of like, I would say they feel small but are, hopefully super impactful.

So the next one would be integrated refunds. Currently if you're a Roofr payments users, a lot of those refunds have to go directly through our payments provider, Payably. And so we are actively working on being able to initiate those through the, the Roofr platform, have them actively report back to Roofr so that, again, everything is in one place.

And then all of that will long-term feed into the credit memos and full refunds workflow, so that way regardless of whether or not you're running through Roofr payments you still feel like our invoicing tool can support you and your business. But that's just a small list of, like, things that we are going to be working on next.

I would love to hear from people on the call, like, what would really make a big impact on your business or helping you collect payments faster or track those payments easier?  

Pete: Yeah, one of the things that I'd like to touch on here, Gabby, and maybe you could just shed some light on it, is how does all the stuff that you showed today interact with our QuickBooks integration?

Gabby: Yeah, so the QuickBooks integration was built on the ability to export invoices, payments, line items, and customers directly from Roofr into QuickBooks. So everything that I demoed today will work just right on top of that. I'll say that payment schedules, the, the payments that have not been received yet, they won't even show up as an option to export to QuickBooks because you don't have, you don't, you haven't received that money yet.

But as soon as a payment is received, or marked as paid, then you'll see it automatically show up as an option to export into QuickBooks.

Pete: From my years of doing this deposits is always a huge one, and refunds, right?

Refunds has always been kind of like a bone of contention of not being able to really effectively handle refunds. Setting that up to be able to do that through the product will be huge, right? Like you said, seems like a small thing, but not really, right? I know we find there to be a tremendous amount of refunds processed, material over-ordering, things like that, you know.

There's a lot of refunds and credits, uh, um, you know, added back

I don't know how fun they are to do a refund. Yeah, I don't know that refunds are ever fun, Joel, but maybe. Maybe in the right situation.  

Gabby: Yeah. I know that being able to text an invoice, especially now that we- Yes ... have SMS capabilities within Roofr.

So that's something that'll be coming out, I would guess, within the next month or two. So that's very much, like, right around the corner. But I do wanna just call out, like, we do have a really strong payments team. So if you are not on Roofr payments or if you signed up but you don't know how to use it or not, are not super familiar with all of our invoicing features, like, our team is very much here to help onboard you, talk you through the entire process from start to finish, whether it's on the application side, whether it's on just creating an invoice or setting up your Roofr account overall.

So don't feel like the book a call has to be just for Roofr payments, we're here to help at any point in this process. And if you have any questions they're super available to, answer any of those.

Maybe a roundabout answer or response to Courtney is that when you send out a deposit on a proposal, you don't have to pick credit card or ACH.

It's really dependent on your company's payment settings. So I'll actually share my screen again really quickly. Let me log into my test account 'cause that's actually set up for payments. And in your company settings within payments, you'll be able to say whether or not you wanna take credit cards or you wanna take ACH.

And you can go even one step further and say whether or not you wanna accept Amex, because Amex does come with a higher fee. And so you can have these as your default settings, but when you're emailing a deposit, via proposal, you can s- even update these within that workflow. So this is risky because I am going to be doing this live.

Um, but you can check and uncheck those boxes from within the create deposit workflow on a proposal. And so I'll come down here. And click this checkbox. And so you can say credit card or ACH. So you don't have to lock them into one payment method or the other. You can offer both if that's something that your company is willing to do.

I hope that answered the question. Love  

Pete: it. Yeah, that's cool. Talk about that a little bit real quick from a payment standpoint, right?

Like, if I'm using Roofr payments, I send an invoice, I've got that payment link on there, what is the turnaround as far as getting paid? What are you guys seeing as far as, like, the speed with which I get paid sending out that link, maybe in comparison to, like, if I was collecting a paper check?

Gabby: It really depends, but I would say just, like, anecdotally, it can happen within minutes. If you are on your customers and I've seen it, like, super efficient where you email it and then you call them, it's like you have a captive audience, and they have the ability to pay right then and there.

Whereas, best case scenario with a check, you call them, "Are you home?" You drive out, you go and pick it up, and then the, you know, not everyone has access to your bank account to, like, deposit those checks right then and there. And so just the, efficiency is so much higher when you're going through and taking digital payments, whether it's through Roofr or not.

You can increase the speed with which you receive payments by days. Just by having that digital payment link.  

Pete: Yeah. In the case that I saw, the customer literally drove to the office of the contractor to drop the check off, right?

So now you've got contractors, you've got customers going out of their way to come to the office to drop a check, right? So it potentially is saving time on both ends.

Gabby: I would even think of it as almost like an opportunity cost.

If you're paying someone to go out and drive around and pick up those checks, one, you're paying for their gas, you're paying for their time, but they could be, you know, knocking on doors. They could be generating net new leads for your company. Right. And so it's not just about the efficiency with which you're able to take those payments.

It's also about how are you growing your business with more time without having to go through the operational side of collecting those checks manually.  

Pete: All right. I wanna thank everybody for joining us today. Thank you, Gabby. Great demo. Some great new stuff coming out from you guys, it just keeps getting better and better.

The platform just keep getting cleaner and cleaner a- and easier to use. Hopefully we can start to convert some more of these customers into not giving you guys paper checks to make your life a little easier and, speed up the process a bit.

We thank everybody for joining us today, and we will see you next time on the Roofr Masterclass. Thanks everybody.  

Gabby: Thanks everyone.

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