Construction Operations System

The scenario

• A residential remodeler with 16 employees, 20 to 30 active subs and suppliers, and 10 to 14 jobs running at any time (illustrative).
• Sub paperwork lives in email attachments, a desk drawer and the office manager’s head.
• New vendors get set up in QuickBooks Online whenever someone remembers, sometimes without a W-9.
• Change orders are agreed verbally on site and show up later as invoice disputes.
• Crew hours are tracked, but not by job, so labor never makes it into job costing.
• The owner knows the business is profitable overall but cannot tell which job types make money.

The ask: “I want to know who’s cleared to work, what we owe, and whether a job is making money, without calling three people.”

The approach

• Gate the risk at the front door: no W-9, signed agreement, current certificate of insurance and workers’ comp paperwork (or exemption, where that applies), no schedule and no payment.
• Make expirations impossible to miss with a tracker that shows days to expiry and a hold flag.
• Code every dollar to a job and cost category before approval, so job costing becomes a byproduct of AP instead of a month-end project.
• Tie crew time to the job, approved before payroll runs, so labor shows up in job costing.
• Treat change orders as a document, not a conversation.
• Design the workflow first, then set it up in the tools already in place.