OPERATIONS
Operations

# The Real Cost of Paperwork: Why Contractors Lose Margin Before the Job Even Starts

LynkedUp Pro Team Jun 2, 2026 6 min read

Ask any owner what their margin is and they'll give you a number from the estimate: 34%, 30%, whatever the spreadsheet says. Ask them what they actually collected on the last ten jobs, and the number is usually lower — sometimes a lot lower. The gap isn't bad pricing. It's paperwork.

Every manual follow-up, every missing project detail, every proposal re-typed because a price changed, every job photo that never made it off someone's phone — each one is small. Stacked across a season, they're the difference between a good year and a break-even one.

## The Hidden Tax on Every Job

We pulled the timeline on a real hail claim — same lead, same roof, run two ways: once through a manual file (voicemail, ladder measurement, typed proposal, mailed revisions), and once through a system that captures, measures, and files automatically.

47 → 15

### Days to close

The manual file sat on a second site visit and a re-typed revision. The automated file never left the queue.

✕ 32 DAYS LOST
12.5 → 0.8

### Admin hours

Nearly a full day of phone tag, retyping, and chasing signatures — on one job.

⚠ PER FILE
$4,120

### Margin at risk

What the manual file was on pace to lose before the job even reached production.

✓ HELD, AUTOMATED

## Where the Margin Actually Leaks

It rarely leaks in one dramatic place. It leaks in the same three spots, on almost every job:

- The second site visit. A measurement taken with a tape and a ladder isn't wrong, but it isn't documented well enough to survive a dispute. When the insurer asks for evidence, someone drives back out.
- The re-typed proposal. A homeowner disputes one line item, and the whole document gets retyped from scratch because there's no live source of truth — just a Word file on someone's desktop.
- The follow-up that never happens. Leads go cold not because reps are lazy, but because there's no system nudging the next action. "I'll call them back" is not a workflow.

> The roof doesn't cost you the margin. The gap between the site visit and the signed proposal does.

## Why "We'll Follow Up" Doesn't Scale

Every sales team believes it follows up consistently. Almost none of them actually do, because follow-up that lives in someone's memory competes with a truck full of other jobs, a crew that needs scheduling, and a phone that won't stop ringing.

The fix isn't a more disciplined team. It's removing the step where a human has to remember anything. A missed call that auto-triggers a text. A scan that becomes a proposal without anyone opening a word processor. A signed job that files its own claim paperwork. None of that requires better people — it requires a system that does the remembering.

## What Actually Fixes It

You don't need to overhaul how your crews work. You need to close the three leaks above:

1. Capture the scan and the measurement in one visit, on the phone that's already in the truck.
2. Generate the proposal from that same data, so a disputed line item is an edit, not a re-type.
3. Let the system trigger the next follow-up automatically, on a schedule a human doesn't have to hold in their head.

None of it is exotic. It's just the difference between a job file that works for you and one you have to work for.

✓ SEE IT ON YOUR OWN NUMBERS

## Run the same comparison on your last job.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll build the before/after timeline using one of your own recent files.

Book a demo See the Cost of Chaos