How Low Voltage Experts, Advanced Cable Systems, Increased Profits and Reduced Inefficiencies with BuildOps

As Advanced Cable Systems grew in both staff and customers, they needed a straightforward solution to track jobs, including materials and hour usage. By implementing a complete job workflow within the BuildOps platform, they were able to reach a new level of efficiency, which made a major impact on overall profitability.

About Advanced Cable Systems

Advanced Cable Systems specializes in low voltage infrastructure and design assistance. They work with local hospitals, city and county maintenance, public and private industry, and numerous IT support companies.

• •
  Industry: C10 electrical contractor
• •
  Location: Santa Barbara, CA
• •
  Use Case:
  • Job tracking
  • Commercial workflow
  • Quickbooks accounting integration

Advanced Cable Systems provides expert services in the design, installation, and support of electrical and low voltage cabling that power the data networks behind the communities most important institutions including hospitals, local government, and public industries. As their business grew, they began to realize that their current method of handling jobs was quickly becoming a source of pain.

Their current software, TSheets, worked fine when they were a smaller company but just couldn’t handle the influx of customers or staff needed to run the business. A big problem with TSheets was that it did not integrate materials or item tracking and it definitely did not pass through to their Quickbooks accounting software. As a result, time would be tracked by TSheets but materials had to be manually audited and added in separately. This imperfect process took away valuable hours and became increasingly cumbersome as the company grew.

After taking a good hard look at the business, Chief Financial Officer, Doug Woodruff came to a conclusion. “We needed to find a better solution because we were finding that our profitability and efficiency was dropping without proper tracking ability,” said Doug.

So he wrote up a short list of requirements that their chosen software platform had to meet (and ideally exceed):

• •
  They needed a straightforward way to capture and track job details from start to finish – without piecemealing together online tools or pen and paper processes
• •
  And to do this, the software had to match a true commercial workflow, not a residential solution in sheep’s clothing
• •
  Lastly, the software would have to include a tight integration with the Quickbooks accounting system.

When they took a look at BuildOps, they were happy to see a solution that tracked in lock-step with their commercial specialty workflow, especially for customer, property, and job tracking in particular. “Other options we had looked at were geared toward residential service calls and small work, said Doug, “but BuildOps had better integration with larger projects that were a better fit for our needs.”

Once Advanced Cabling Systems took the plunge and implemented BuildOps, they were surprised to see that after the initial setup, creating jobs and managing the item list were significantly faster than how they were doing things before. Plus, their technicians adopted the new software quickly and appreciated the ability to input materials directly into their job visit.

The new-found efficiencies extended far past the field and into the back-office, where excellent record-keeping and timelines are critical to margins and cashflow. “The visibility and speed at which we can complete next steps is a night and day difference, ” remarked Doug, “after we review the field technician report we can check what materials were used and quickly populate everything into an invoice without need for manual entry in the office.” Using BuildOps’ all-in-one solution, Advanced Cabling Systems was able to minimize workflow bottlenecks and send out invoices faster, which allowed them to get paid faster.

Best of all, BuildOps has an out-of-the-box integration with Quickbooks that actually works seamlessly.

With their old software, in order to get the functionality they needed with Quickbooks, they would have had to completely change the way they categorized their customer and job data. Even worse, it also required them to wipe all the historical data from TSheets and start again. Neither of those options were ideal, to say the least.

With BuildOps, they were up and running easily with Quickbooks. The straightforward integration plus the added benefits of pulling through materials from job to accounting made a huge difference in their day to day workflow.

And as for growth? “We have been steadily growing and would like to continue to grow while keeping an eye out for office overhead,” said Doug. “With BuildOps taking some of the most tedious and time-consuming administrative load off of our shoulders during this growth period it gives us more confidence that we’re keeping track of billable items.”

“I would recommend BuildOps for any company that is in need of a platform to take care of job tracking and billing needs and requires a degree of flexibility. There are many options on the platform that tailor well to a variety of workflows and the BuildOps support teams are very responsive to customer needs,” said Doug.

Ready to take a test drive of BuildOps? Contact us for a demo to get started.