A Typo on Your Roof Bid Should Come Back as a Corrected Page

A roof bid is a short document that carries a lot of facts: your street address, the owner's name, the parcel number, the square count, the shingle line, and the price. When one of those facts is wrong, the error travels. The permit application gets built from it, the crew orders materials from it, and the final invoice gets checked against it. Typos turn up in every contractor's paperwork, so the question for a homeowner comparing roofers is not whether a bid contains a mistake. It is how the roofer handles the mistake once you point it out.

Which errors matter most

Not every typo changes the job. A misspelled word in the cover letter costs nothing. Some errors do move money or move the work, and those are the ones to check first against your own records:

• The property address and the city or subdivision name, since the permit desk and the inspector work from them
• The owner's legal name, and whether a second owner appears on the deed
• The parcel number, which you can match against the county assessor's record
• The square count and the pitch, since shingle quantity and labor follow them
• The shingle product line and color, which decide what arrives on the pallet
• The total, and whether the line items add up to it

Pull your own copies before you read the bids side by side. A homeowner who has the county parcel record and a photo of the house number at the curb can catch a wrong street name in a minute. A homeowner who has only the bid cannot tell which copy holds the error.

What to ask each roofer

Send the same message to every roofer you are comparing, with the same list of errors. Do not describe how you found the mistake in a way that hints at the answer you want. Ask:

1. How will you correct this error, and will the correction come as a new dated document?
2. Who on your staff makes the change, and who checks it before it goes out?
3. Does the correction change the price, the square count or the start date, and if so, which lines move?
4. Will the old version be marked void in writing, so I can tell which one governs?
5. If the error appeared in a contract I have already signed, what do we sign to fix it?

Write down the time each answer arrived. A roofer who replies the same afternoon with a clear list of changed lines is giving you a different kind of reply than one who says the bid is fine and asks you to sign anyway.

What a clean correction looks like

A good correction is short and complete. It names the line that changed, shows the old and new values side by side, gives a new date and version number, and lists the lines that did not change. It does not ask you to trust a verbal fix. If the square count changed, the shingle quantity and the labor line should change with it, and the correction should say so. If the total moved by a few hundred dollars, the reason should appear on the page.

Look for the address and parcel number on the corrected page. These are the two facts the permit desk will check first. In St. Louis County, a permit application that carries the wrong address or parcel can be sent back, and the roof date moves with it. Chesterfield, Kirkwood and the other municipalities each run their own intake desks, so an address that reads correctly on paper but does not match the county record can still cause a delay.

Keep your own record of each version

Save every bid exactly as it arrived, with the email or the file name intact. Save the date the message reached you, not only the date printed on the PDF, because some documents carry the day they were drafted rather than the day they were sent. Keep the reply to every correction request in the same folder. When you later check the invoice against the contract, you will want to show which version each line came from, and a folder of originals makes that a short task instead of an argument.

Screenshots are weaker than originals. Keep the file itself. If a roofer sends a corrected bid as a photo of a printed page, ask for the digital file as well, so the text can be searched and the numbers can be added up.

Compare the replies, not the first bid

Put each roofer's correction on the same sheet as the original bids. Record the version number, the date sent, the lines changed, and whether the corrected total matches the sum of its lines. A roofer whose correction is clean and dated is easier to compare than one whose corrected bid has no version number, because you will know exactly which document to hold them to.

If a roofer refuses to put a correction in writing, treat that refusal as data too, and ask for it in writing. The point of this exercise is not to catch anyone out. It is to make sure the document you sign is the one the crew will build from, and that you can show which one that is if the job goes wrong later.

If Keys Roofing is one of the bids you are comparing, put the same questions to Keys and ask for the answers in writing. The office number is (314) 220-2333.