Benjamin Keyzlar and Yajaira Landeros are the whole finance team at Multilevel Framing, a family-run wood framing contractor in Austin, Texas. Every vendor bill and every pay application used to be read, typed into QuickBooks, matched to a job and checked against the purchase order by hand.
Cru now reads each document the way a construction bookkeeper would. It proposes the vendor, the job and the expense account, and posts it to QuickBooks once Yajaira approves it. About 450 bills and invoices a quarter go through this way.
The company
- Family-owned contractor based in Austin, doing multifamily and commercial wood framing across Texas
- About 13 employees, with framing crews fully subcontracted
- Two-person finance team: a CFO and a bookkeeper
- Runs QuickBooks Online, with jobs tracked under each general contractor
The challenge: a small team, a lot of paper
Multilevel pays its crews fast. Crew invoices arrive Wednesday and checks go out Thursday or Friday. Ben says that speed is how the company keeps good labor.
That pace leaves little room for data entry. Construction accounting adds its own layer. Every cost has to land on a job. Pay applications carry retainage. Material bills trace back to a quote. Two things made it hard.
First, every document was typed twice in effect. Yajaira read the bill, entered it in QuickBooks, then worked out which job and which expense account it belonged to. Vendors write job names differently. Some only list a delivery address.
Second, the books had to be right every day. Ben runs job costing and cash flow off QuickBooks. A bill coded to the wrong job or the wrong account throws off both.
"Every bill meant typing it into QuickBooks, then working out which job it belonged to. Every vendor writes the job name a different way." Yajaira Landeros
The solution: review instead of entry
Here is the flow, simplified into four steps.
- A bill or pay application arrives in the team's connected inbox.
- Cru reads it as a construction document. It tells a vendor bill from a pay application and proposes the vendor, the job and the expense account from Multilevel's own QuickBooks lists. It also flags documents already in QuickBooks.
- Yajaira compares the proposal to the attachment and approves or corrects it.
- Cru posts it to QuickBooks. Retainage on pay applications is carried through, so what is billed and what is held back stay separate.
QuickBooks stays the system of record. Nothing posts without a person approving it.
"It saves me real time. I used to type every bill into QuickBooks. Now I compare what Cru filled in against the attachment and approve it." Yajaira Landeros
The results
About 30 hours a quarter back. Yajaira works AP and AR in Cru every day. We estimate four to five minutes to key and code a bill by hand, against about 30 seconds to review one in Cru. That is about 85% less time per bill. At about 450 a quarter it comes to roughly 30 hours, which is close to four working days every quarter.
"Cru is part of my daily routine now. An invoice comes in, I open Cru, and most of the time it takes a few seconds to check it and send it to QuickBooks." Yajaira Landeros
More jobs, the same two people. Multilevel started several new jobs this fall. The finance team is still Ben and Yajaira.
Cru fits how a contractor keeps its books. Cru is built around job costing, so every bill lands on a job as well as an account. It proposes from Multilevel's own QuickBooks: its vendors, its jobs under each general contractor and its chart of accounts. It also looks at how Multilevel has coded each vendor before, so its suggestions follow the company's own habits.
Review got faster as trust built. Routine bills from known vendors take Yajaira a few seconds to check. Cru marks the items it is less sure of, such as a new vendor or a job it has not seen before, and those are where she spends her time.
"At the start I checked every field. Now it knows our vendors and our jobs. I move quickly through the routine ones and spend my time on the ones it flags as new." Yajaira Landeros
Material bills get checked against the quote. Lumber and hardware are quoted up front, then billed over the life of the job. Cru lines up each material bill against the quote for that job, so any difference in price or quantity shows up before the bill is paid.
"Last year I would literally print out the purchase order and compare the invoice to the purchase order." Yajaira Landeros
"I like seeing each bill next to the quote. On a long job, prices and quantities can drift, and now we see any difference before we pay." Benjamin Keyzlar, CFO
It gets better with use
In the first weeks, Cru would occasionally miss a job or a vendor. Every vendor labels a job differently, and some bills only carry a delivery address.
That changed quickly. Cru starts with how construction accounting works and then learns from Multilevel's own books. Each bill Yajaira approves posts to QuickBooks and becomes part of the history Cru draws on, so the next bill from that vendor is coded the way Multilevel codes it. Within the first month, matching of vendors and jobs had improved sharply.
The more Multilevel uses it, the less there is to correct.
What's next: an automated WIP report
Ben still builds his work in progress (WIP) report by hand in Google Sheets. A WIP report shows, job by job, what has been earned against what has been billed. It is one of the most important reports in construction accounting, and it is only as good as the job-level books underneath it.
Automating it is what Cru and Multilevel are working on next. The Cru ledger holds every cost and every billing by job. Cru will build the WIP report from it automatically and keep it current as bills post. Ben will no longer rebuild it by hand.