As construction businesses expand their operations, a lack of integrated data can slow them down. Legacy technology systems often produce fragmented, siloed data that contributes to errors and bottlenecks, including inaccurate job costing, cost overruns, and compliance risks. Adopting an industry-specific integrated technology platform can help construction business leaders solve these issues and scale their enterprises to achieve their growth goals.
Construction businesses face ever-evolving challenges
The construction business is dynamic and fast-paced. Business leaders must navigate operational complexity, fluctuating materials costs, tight job deadlines, labor shortages, distributed workforces, and more. As a result, decision-makers need access to real-time data and insights, especially when scaling their enterprises.
“Construction is a competitive and demanding business,” says Wyatt Jenkins, SVP of Product, Mid-Market, for Intuit. “Now more than ever, leaders of growing companies need to make informed decisions quickly and with confidence.”
At the same time, it’s not uncommon for mid-market businesses (including construction firms) to use different systems in different departments. According to research conducted by Forrester Consulting, 59% of mid-market firms struggle with non-integrated data repositories. When financial data is housed across disparate systems, reporting and reconciliation take longer, limiting executives’ access to real-time, accurate information and business metrics. This can slow down critical decision-making, negatively impacting revenue and growth. In construction, it can also contribute to:
- Inaccurate job costing
- Cost overruns
- Inability to track project profitability
- Repeat mistakes
- Missed deadlines
- Compliance risks
The larger the firm, the more likely data fragmentation is to affect profitability. For business leaders focused on growth, alleviating these problems is critical.
For growing companies, fragmented data slows down decision making
When Cornerstone Development Company launched in 2017, it was a husband-and-wife team flipping houses. Fast forward, and the business has expanded to encompass five entities managing eight-figure construction projects and more than 70 full-time employees. As the company grew, a lack of data integration caused financial management to become a major burden and a stubborn bottleneck.
To solve the problem, Cornerstone invested in an ERP solution that would replace its fragmented systems and time-consuming manual processes with a unified platform. Consolidating its five entities with one shared chart of accounts and automated intercompany transactions eliminated time-consuming manual processes. Cornerstone also streamlined its time-tracking and payroll functions and implemented AI-driven insights to flag projects with profit margins below expectations.
Similarly, family-owned Lallier Construction (LCI) found that after expanding to include four separate entities and five distinct internal divisions, a disjointed tech stack and a lack of data integration were creating excessive work for their finance team. During a busy week, verifying data accuracy for intercompany transactions was taking up to 20 hours of their finance director’s valuable (and limited) time. LCI’s leadership determined that they needed a centralized, integrated platform to serve as the foundation of their operations as the company continued to grow.
An integrated technology platform saves time and empowers decision makers
As both Cornerstone and LCI discovered, streamlining intercompany transactions and related processes can yield significant time and cost savings—in some cases, up to $147,000, according to a report by Intuit. And that’s only one example of the value that data integration can deliver to construction businesses. Intuit Enterprise Suite consolidates company financials, payroll, and project data on a single platform—enabling real-time insights, faster decisions, and recovered revenue.
Improving data quality and enhancing reporting capabilities can facilitate more efficient end-of-month reconciliations, potentially saving 60%-95% of the time spent on reconciliation tasks within three years.1 In addition, Intuit Enterprise Suite allows business leaders to consolidate financial systems and various accounts into a single login, reducing screen switching, streamlining data entry for intercompany transactions, and reducing data errors resulting from manual entry. By the three-year mark, businesses can save between 75% and 95% of annual time spent on data entry.
Cornerstone CEO Chad Shaules reports a significant decrease in manual labor required to produce CPA-reviewed financials for the company’s five entities since adopting Intuit Enterprise Suite. This has resulted in a 50% reduction in month-end close time and significantly lowered the cost of external CPA audits. Meanwhile, the team at LCI achieved a 90% reduction in intercompany month-end reconciliation time during peak season, as well as automating hundreds of invoices per month via multi-entity journal entries, and 300% targeted revenue growth supported by Intuit Enterprise Suite.
“Embracing agentic platforms that have the ability to make strong predictions and can support data integration and automation empowers growing construction firms to tackle the industry’s biggest challenges,” said Jenkins.
To learn more about Intuit Enterprise Suite construction edition, visit https://www.intuit.com/enterprise/construction/.
1 Based on a composite firm with $12 million revenue, 10 entities in various industries, 23 corporate employees, a CFO and two bookkeepers, deploying Intuit Enterprise Suite with Accounting, Payroll and Time functionality
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Leigha Schildgen