I did not know what a second truck roll cost me until I sat down one January with a year of job files and a legal pad. I was trying to figure out why a decent revenue year felt so thin. The answer was not material prices. It was that I had driven to 61 properties twice, and about 40 of those return trips existed for one reason: somebody who needed to see the roof could not see it the first time.
That is the number this post is about. Not the vague sense that windshield time is expensive. The actual arithmetic.
Building the number for your own shop
Here is how I do it. Use your own figures, not mine, because a dense suburb and a rural territory are different businesses.
Direct vehicle cost. Fuel, tires, brakes, insurance, the truck payment spread over its life. The IRS mileage rate is a reasonable stand-in if you have nothing better. Call it 70 cents a mile. A 22 mile round trip is about $15.
Labor at loaded cost. This is where people cheat. If your inspector is at $28 an hour, his loaded cost with payroll taxes, workers comp, and benefits is closer to $38. A return trip is 35 minutes of driving, 20 minutes on site, and 10 minutes of parking, gearing up, and writing it up. Call it 65 minutes, or about $41.
The slot. This is the big one and it never shows up in anybody's spreadsheet. That hour and five minutes was not free time. It was a slot that could have held a first inspection on a new lead. If you close roughly a third of the inspections you run and your average job nets $2,800, the expected value of an inspection slot is somewhere around $930. Even if you only count the slots you actually turned away, which for me was maybe one in four return trips, that is $230 in expected margin per return trip.
Scheduling drag. Every return trip has a coordination cost. Two or three phone calls, a rescheduled window, sometimes a no-show. Twenty minutes of office time at a loaded $30 an hour is $10, plus the harder-to-price cost of a customer who now has your job in the "waiting" pile in their head.
Add it up and one return visit is roughly $296 in true cost, of which $230 is opportunity and only $56 is out of pocket. That gap is why this expense hides. Nothing in your bank statement says "second truck roll cost." It shows up as a year that felt busy and paid like it was not.
Forty of those in a year is $11,840.
Why the second truck roll cost is worse than that
My $296 is conservative in three ways.
It assumes the second trip closes the loop. Plenty of mine did not. A third of my return trips were to properties where the person who needed to see it still was not there, or the spouse who actually makes decisions was at work again, or the property manager wanted photos forwarded to an owner in another state. Then you are looking at a third visit or a slow fade.
It ignores decay. A lead that needs a second visit is older than a lead that does not, and older leads close worse. I do not have a clean decay curve for my own shop, but the gap between the inspection and the decision is where jobs go to die.
It ignores the crew version. I only counted inspection return trips. The same math applies when a crew lead drives back because a photo did not show what somebody needed to see.
What actually removes the second trip
Not urgency. I tried that. Faster follow-up, same-day reports, calling instead of emailing. It moved the needle a little and mostly made me annoying.
What removed it was letting the person who needed to see the roof see the roof while I was on it. Not a photo set that arrives at 7pm. Live, with narration, while I am standing on the thing being discussed and can answer a question by pointing the camera.
The mechanics matter more than the concept. If the homeowner has to install anything, half of them will not, and you are back to a return trip. If the stream dies at one bar, you are back to a return trip. I went through what to look for in remote field inspection software, and every question there is downstream of one economic point: the tool only saves a trip if it works on the first try with a person who has never used it.
The math on the other side
If a return trip costs $296 all in and a tool prevents even half of them, that is $5,900 a year on my volume, which is small. A shop running three inspectors is looking at something well north of $20,000 in recovered slots.
Compare that to what a per-job tool costs and the decision stops being interesting. This is why I priced ours per inspection instead of per seat, and why the pricing is published rather than hidden behind a demo call. If a tool costs more per job than the trip it prevents, it is not worth having, and you should be able to check that in ten seconds without talking to anybody.
There is a version of this where the savings are exaggerated, and I want to be honest about it. Some second visits are legitimate. Some are the job. If you are pulling a pipe boot to look underneath, you are going back and you should. The trips worth eliminating are the ones that exist purely because somebody could not see what you saw. In my file that was about two thirds of them.
One thing this does not solve
A live walk shortens the distance between the inspection and the decision. It does not change what you are allowed to say during it, and the temptation runs the other direction when you can feel a decision getting close.
I document condition. I describe what I observed on the roof, in plain language, on camera. I do not tell a homeowner what damage is worth, whether to file anything, or how to read their policy. That is not my license and it is not my lane. If insurance is part of their situation, they deal with their insurer directly and what I hand them is a clean record of what the roof looked like on the day I was standing on it. A faster process is not worth much if it gets you crosswise with your state's rules about who is allowed to do what.
If you want to see how a session runs before you do this math on your own files, the how it works page walks it end to end. Book a walkthrough if you would rather see it live, and bring your own numbers.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.