Getting Construction Invoices Out 4 Days Faster

Advanced Framing Construction | Greenville, TX

Team: ~70 field | 20+ office
Systems: QuickBooks → NetSuite | Fieldwire | Mitre

How We Helped a Framing Contractor Bill Faster and Get to Cash Sooner

A large framing contractor manages 20–30 active projects at a time across six states, coordinating multiple crews and subcontractors on complex apartment construction projects.

The company was using QuickBooks Online Projects to track job costs. But at this size and complexity, QBO wasn't giving the project manager what he needed to efficiently prepare the payment applications (PayApps) submitted to general contractors for billing.

The Problem

Before a PayApp could be submitted to the general contractor, the project manager needed to determine which costs had been incurred for each job and make sure those costs were properly included in the billing.

Getting the information out of QuickBooks Online, matching it to the correct project and validating everything took approximately four days each month.

That wasn't just an efficiency problem.

It was a cash-flow problem.

Costs incurred after the lengthy analysis began could miss that month's billing cutoff. The contractor had already spent the money on labor, materials or subcontractors — but might have to wait until the following month's PayApp to bill the general contractor for those costs.

What We Built

We created a financial reporting system that connected the project costs in QuickBooks Online with the company's PayApp billing process.

The system:

Pulls QBO job costs → matches costs to the correct project and billing period → validates the information → gives the project manager a simple dashboard for review.

Instead of spending days preparing and assembling the information, the manager could spend his time where it was much more valuable:

Reviewing it.

The Result

The new process:

• Accelerated the monthly PayApp process by approximately four days

• Helped capture project costs in the current billing cycle instead of potentially waiting another month

• Accelerated the path from cost incurred → customer billing → cash collection

• Reduced manual extraction and validation of QBO project data

• Gave the project manager more time to review the numbers instead of preparing them

• Created a repeatable process across 20–30 simultaneous construction projects

And perhaps our favorite measure of success came directly from the manager responsible for the PayApps:

“Your system helps me so much. When it breaks, I break.”

We love that quote. Not because we want anything to break, but because it tells us the system became something the team actually used and depended on.

And systems do change. QuickBooks changes field names. Data sources change. Businesses change.

Building the solution is only part of the job. Keeping the financial system connected, current and working as the business changes is what makes the improvement last.