Whoever punctured it, the call comes to you
Mechanical set the units, somebody cut your membrane, and the GC still calls you. Two men and a truck later you've proven it wasn't yours and billed nobody.
No other trade's completed work becomes the deck that everybody else stands on for the next year. That's why roofing eats service calls that are really damage claims from other subs. The evidence window closes in hours: the moment the trade that made the hole seals it up, your proof is gone and the call becomes a warranty call by default.
The size of it
Two men and a truck go out for half a day, several times per job, with no cost code open and no change order behind it. Across a year of jobs that's tens of thousands of dollars of unbilled labor sitting in overhead, draining the margin on jobs that already closed clean.
Your finished product is the work platform for everyone who follows: mechanical setting RTUs and hanging condensate lines, electrical running conduit on sleepers, plumbers cutting vents, sheet metal crews, and solar installers. A membrane leak has one symptom, water inside, and ten possible causes, so the GC's default is to call the roofer first every single time. Proving the puncture belongs to another trade takes dated photos at the moment of discovery, before the offending trade patches its own hole and before anyone can argue about the entry point, since water tracks 40 feet from where it got in. Most roofers have no standing documentation routine, so the backcharge never gets written and the truck roll gets absorbed into overhead.
Three moves, in order
Step 08: Standards and accountability
Five hours a month of owner time, spent ahead of the work.
What else costs roofing contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What roofing owners ask
How to backcharge another trade for punctures in my roof membrane?
Mechanical set the units, somebody cut your membrane, and the GC still calls you. Two men and a truck later you've proven it wasn't yours and billed nobody.
What does it cost?
Two men and a truck go out for half a day, several times per job, with no cost code open and no change order behind it. Across a year of jobs that's tens of thousands of dollars of unbilled labor sitting in overhead, draining the margin on jobs that already closed clean.
What do I do first?
Open a leak call cost code on every job at closeout so those hours and truck time post somewhere you can see them instead of in overhead.
What are roofing contractors supposed to be making?
Roofing runs 22% gross margin, 15% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits right on it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 08, standards and accountability. Five hours a month of owner time, spent ahead of the work. It comes from chapter 8 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.