When somebody asks for your records is about the request arriving from outside: somebody writes, and you have to decide what you can hand over. This one is quieter. Nobody is demanding anything. A homeowner you liked calls on a Tuesday, three years after you finished their roof, and says there is a stain on the bedroom ceiling.
A warranty callback is not really a question about today. It is a question about a day three years ago, and whether anything survives from it. You will either open something and look, or you will drive out there and start from a blank page. That fork was decided on the last day of the original job, by a person who was tired and wanted to go home.
What the callback is actually asking
Strip the emotion out and the call contains one question with three possible answers. Is this the work we did, is this something new that happened since, or is this something that was already there and we never touched it?
You cannot answer that from the ceiling stain. A stain tells you water arrived; it does not tell you when the path opened. What separates the three answers is a picture of what that part of the building was on the day you handed it over. Without one, you are reasoning from memory about a roof you have not thought about in three years.
Nothing here is about what you do once you know. That is a conversation between you and the person who owns the building. This post is only about whether the record exists to have the conversation from.
What has to be in the record to be worth anything in year three
A record that is useful this far out has a particular shape, and it is not the shape most job folders have.
- The work itself, in place, at completion. Not just the fix. The fix with enough of the surrounding field in frame that you can locate it later.
- The parts you did not touch. The single most valuable thing in a three-year-old file is footage of the areas that were not in scope, in whatever condition they were in. That is what tells you the stain is under a section nobody worked on. Documenting pre-existing wear is the habit that produces it.
- A date that came from the system, not from a filename. Somebody typing a date into a folder name is not a date. Timestamps that hold up covers the difference.
- Who was there and what was said out loud. Narration ages far better than photographs. "This is the second vent from the west, the boot is new, the deck around it is sound" is a sentence that still means something in year three. A photo of a vent is not.
Notice that all four are things you produce during the job, not afterwards. Nobody has ever reconstructed a record in year three. You either made it or you did not.
Retention is a warranty decision, not a storage decision
Here is the part most companies never connect. The workmanship warranty you print on your proposal has a length. Two years, five years, ten, sometimes longer. However long that is, it is the period during which somebody can call you about that roof and you will want to look at something.
Now put that next to how long your records actually live. On InspectStream, retention follows the plan: 90 days on Solo, one year on Crew, three years on Company. Those are real numbers on the pricing page, and they are worth reading against your own warranty rather than against your storage bill.
If you offer a five-year workmanship warranty and your records evaporate at 90 days, the warranty is a promise you have no way to reason about after the first quarter. That does not make the plan wrong. It means retention alone is not your whole answer, and the gap has to be closed deliberately.
The way to close it is at closeout, not at year three. On jobs you warrant longer than you retain, pull the completion record out and file it with the job the same week you finish, in whatever your company treats as permanent. Getting your inspection records out walks through the export side of that, and how long to keep inspection photos is the longer argument about matching what you keep to what you promised.
Recordings are private either way, reached through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs, so an export is always a deliberate act by somebody in your company. That is the security model.
What the record will not do for you
It will not tell you what caused anything. It shows a condition on a date, from one vantage point, narrated by one person, and that is genuinely all. What a record cannot prove is worth reading before you lean on one too hard.
What it does do is remove the memory contest. Three years is long enough that both sides are sincerely remembering different roofs. When you can pull up the walk from the last day and hear yourself say what was there, the Tuesday phone call stops being an argument about recollections and turns into two people looking at the same thing. That is a much better call for everybody on it, including the homeowner.
Five minutes on the last day
The habit that makes all of this possible is small and boring. Before you pull the ladder, run a short live walk of the finished work with the owner watching from the ground, and let it record. Say where you are, what was done, and what you did not touch. The recording starts on its own and lands with the company rather than on the installer's phone, which matters in year three because the installer may not work for you anymore.
Five minutes on the last day is the entire difference between answering a warranty callback and guessing at one. You will not know which jobs needed it. That is exactly why it goes on all of them.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.