Brothers Concrete, a Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. firm specializing in retail, institutional, office, and residential structures, implemented Sage Timberline Office Estimating about five years ago, replacing a complex spreadsheet-based system. Accounting and project management tasks were tackled in two separate unrelated programs.
“We had three systems, one for estimating, one for accounting, and another for project management,” said Guy Goddard, vice president and chief financial officer for Brothers Concrete. “Each system worked well independently, but we didn’t have a way to see the big picture. We needed an integrated system that would bring these components together and let us look at the company’s performance as a whole.”
Goddard previously worked for a contractors’ bonding agency and recalled that Sage
Timberline Office was highly regarded by both the agency and its contractor customers for comprehensive accounting, project management, and estimating components. “It has a great reputation in the industry,” said Goddard. Based on that reputation and the company’s positive experience with the Estimating component of the solution, Brothers Concrete moved its entire operation to Sage Timberline Office.
The company’s local Sage Authorized Partner, Axlin Data Systems, was able to migrate data from the old accounting software to Sage Timberline Office. “We brought customer, vendor, and general ledger data over,” explained Goddard. “It was a perfect transition, very smooth.”
The outcome has benefited the entire company, cutting some processes that took weeks down to days. One significant improvement has been the availability of productivity reports. “Our most critical expense is labor,” said Goddard. “So understanding and influencing how productive we are is a major component in job profitability.”
Additionally, the success of a job often depends on a contractor’s ability to make the right decisions quickly. Sage Timberline Office Project Management empowers Brothers Concrete with the data it needs to make quick, well-informed decisions.
“Management has one place where we can see exactly where we stand at any moment,” said Goddard. “For example, I can instantly see the status of contracts, profit, billings, costs, cash, RFIs (requests for information), and change orders all at once.”
The transition from spreadsheets to the state-of-the-art estimating solution also represented a major improvement in the company’s workflow.
“It was like moving from the stone-age to the new age,” said Goddard. “We can easily bring up prior estimates to use as the basis for new ones and we can update labor and material costs in one location and have those costs flow through the estimates. As a result of Sage Timberline Office our estimating process has reached a high level of sophistication and accuracy.”
