How to choose a roofing CRM: 12 questions to ask before you sign

Most roofing companies do not switch CRMs because they found something better. They switch because the last one quietly cost them money for two years and the end of month finally proved it. The way to avoid that is to ask harder questions before you sign, not after.

Here are the twelve we would ask any platform, including ours.

1. What does the real monthly cost come to?

Per user pricing is only the start. Ask what estimating, invoicing, reporting, and integrations add to the bill. Many platforms quote a low seat price and sell the rest back to you as add ons. Get the all in number for your crew size in writing. We broke down the typical numbers in what a roofing CRM actually costs, and our own answer is on the pricing page: one plan, everything included.

2. Is there an onboarding fee, and how long is deployment?

Legacy enterprise rollouts run six to nine months. That is six to nine months of paying for two systems. Ask for a deployment timeline in days, with names attached. Trussi deploys in 17 days.

3. Can it estimate a roof, or does it just store the estimate?

A CRM that stores PDFs is a filing cabinet. Ask whether the platform builds the estimate itself, with your labor rates, your material catalog, and your margin visible line by line. See how we handle it in estimating.

4. Where do measurements come from?

If reps are re typing numbers from a measurement report into the estimate, you are paying for the same data twice and inviting errors. Ask which measurement providers are native. Trussi orders and imports measurements inside the job record.

5. Does money live in the same system as the job?

This is the question that separates real platforms from pretty pipelines. Invoices, payments, commissions, and job costs should sit on the job record, not in a separate tool that syncs on a delay. Ask to see a job’s cash position live. Ours is in finance.

6. What happens when a payment fails?

Nobody asks this in the demo. Ask anyway. An ACH payment can be approved today and pulled back two weeks later. If the platform does not surface returned payments on the project and block the books from exporting wrong numbers, your accountant finds out last.

7. How does it connect to QuickBooks?

Not "do you integrate," but at what level. Summary level sync hides job profitability. Job level sync shows it. Ask which one you are getting. Details on our QuickBooks integration.

8. What can the owner see without asking anyone?

If your numbers arrive in a Monday spreadsheet, you are running the company on last week’s information. Ask what the owner dashboard shows in real time: pipeline, production, collections, margin by job. Then ask to see it with live data, not a demo dataset.

9. Who can see what?

A sales rep should not see company financials. A branch manager should not see another branch’s commissions. Ask whether permissions are enforced at the database layer or just hidden in the interface.

10. Will the field crew actually use it?

The best system is the one your people update from a driveway. Ask to see the mobile app upload photos, capture a signature, and move a job stage on one bar of signal. Then hand the phone to your least patient PM.

11. Who is behind it, and do they run roofs on it?

Software built by people who have never chased a supplement behaves like it. Ask who built the platform and whether a real contractor runs their whole operation on it. Trussi was built by roofers and runs a $70M operator across 18+ locations every day.

12. What proof exists beyond the demo?

Ask for numbers, not adjectives. Live users, leads processed per month, uptime, patents. Anything a vendor cannot put a number on, discount. Our answers are in the FAQ, all 124 of them.

The short version

Take these twelve questions into every demo, including ours. A strong platform gets stronger under this kind of questioning. A weak one gets vague. If you want to run Trussi through the list yourself, book a demo and bring your numbers.