A roof survey lands on a facilities manager's desk saying the roof is in poor condition and recommending full replacement at £180,000. It may be entirely correct. It is also indistinguishable, from the desk, from a survey by somebody who sells roofs — and the manager has a budget cycle, a leak in the corner of the boardroom, and no way of telling which parts of the roof are failing now and which will fail in six years.

We edit what roofing contractors and surveyors produce — condition surveys and their recommendations, defect reports and leak investigation findings, repair versus replacement options and their reasoning, specifications for recovering and replacement, warranty and guarantee documentation, maintenance and inspection regimes, method statements for roof works, access and safety documentation for roof areas, quotations and their exclusions, and handover and log book documentation. Our editors work on the survey a client has to budget from.

The condition survey is where a roofer is either trusted or suspected, and its failure is a single verdict covering a roof that is not in a single condition. Roofs fail area by area, and a report that averages them produces either an unaffordable recommendation or a false reassurance. We work through these so the roof is divided into areas that can be dealt with separately, with each one given its own condition, its remaining life as a range, and what would extend it, since this is what allows a manager to phase work across budgets; so the difference between what is leaking now, what will leak within two years and what is merely aged is made explicit, because these have completely different urgencies and get flattened into "poor condition"; so every recommendation is priced with the cost of doing nothing for another year stated alongside, given that a client choosing to defer should know what deferral costs; so evidence is shown for each finding — the photograph, the moisture reading, the core sample — with its location, as an unevidenced recommendation from somebody who sells roofs is discounted; so the recommendation for a repair is given even where replacement is preferable, since a survey offering only the expensive option looks like a sales document; and so what could not be inspected is stated. Surveys written this way get funded, in stages, by managers who trust them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including surveys, reports and client information. We are editors rather than roofing or building surveyors, and we offer no view on condition, remaining life or specification. What we can do is make the survey something a client can budget from.