You fly the roof in twenty minutes. Then you get home, dump 80 images off the SD card, pick the useful 15, crop them, drag them into a Word template, draw arrows with the shape tool, retype the same descriptions you typed last week, fight the image anchoring for ten minutes, export to PDF and email it. That back-office half of the job routinely takes longer than the flight — and it is the part nobody pays extra for.
The real costs of a hand-built report
- Turnaround: a report that lands two days later feels slower and less professional than one that lands the same afternoon, regardless of how good the flying was.
- Inconsistency: the wording, the severity language and the layout drift between jobs and between staff. That is exactly what an insurer or a solicitor pulls at.
- Capacity: if admin takes two hours per job, three surveys is a full day. The ceiling on your revenue is your typing speed, not your airspace.
- Missed defects: by image sixty, human attention is measurably worse than it was at image five.
- Version chaos: PDFs in email threads with no single canonical copy when a client comes back six months later.
What replaces it
Upload the images straight from the card. Each one is analysed for slipped and cracked tiles, hail bruising and granule loss, mortar failure, flashing and valley defects, gutter faults and moss, and each detection arrives pre-boxed with a category, a plain-English description, a severity grade and a confidence score. You work through them approving, editing or rejecting — and drawing your own markers on anything missed. AI-generated photo captions and bulk approval cut a multi-elevation job down to a few minutes of review.
The output your client gets
- A live web report on its own private link, plus a print-ready PDF version.
- Every defect circled on the photograph, with severity colour-coding and a written description.
- A toggle to hide the markers and see the roof exactly as the drone saw it — markers always reappear on print.
- An optional short personal video from you at the top of the report.
- Your logo, your brand colour, your contact details, on the report and the client email. Fully white-labelled.
What it costs
One credit publishes one report. Credits are £10 each, £9 on the 10-pack, £8 on the 25-pack and £7.40 on the 50-pack. Against two hours of your own time per report, the arithmetic is not close — and a same-day, properly branded report is something you can charge more for, not just deliver faster.
Switching over
Sign up for a trade account, upload your logo, set your brand colour and run your next job through it alongside your usual Word process. Compare the two outputs side by side. Most operators do not go back to the template after the first job. Have a look at the sample report first if you want to see the end product before you commit.