How a Multi-Division Contractor United Their Office With the Field Using FOUNDATION®
Founded in 1956, Air Control is a woman-owned contracting company based in Clinton, Iowa, operating several distinct divisions: commercial HVAC, government general contracting, residential HVAC service and installs and a welding and manufacturing shop.
Joining the company in 2014, Accountant Anne Schneider grappled with Air Control’s limited accounting system, which fractured administrative tasks.
Payroll was siloed in a separate, single-license overseas platform, meaning support was always 12 hours out of sync. And paper invoices sat on desks, field workers lacked pay visibility and the office spent its days printing reports and tracking down approvals.
Air Control needed a system friendly to the field and accessible by the whole office.
Disconnected System, Lost Time
For years, Air Control struggled with the limitations of their accounting system.
“It was really an accounting-based system,” Schneider said. “And it wasn’t very user-friendly for project managers or people that don’t know accounting.”
Anyone without credentials was essentially locked out of project financials. So, any time project managers needed information, it would have to come directly from Schneider and her team.
“They had paper binders filled with specs, and they would come to us for the purchase orders for everything,” Schneider said.
Meanwhile, the office ran on paper, with invoices sitting on desks to be hand-approved, which led to things getting lost in the shuffle.
Our payroll used to be separated from our accounting system. But now with FOUNDATION everything’s connected, and there’s better visibility for everyone.
Anne Schneider
Accountant
Air Control, Inc.
One System to Unite the Company
In 2018, Air Control moved to FOUNDATION to bridge the gap between field and office.
“We wanted the field guys to be able to see their jobs and know what was going on with them, instead of me having to give them reports all the time,” Schneider said.
With FOUNDATION, it was easy to have more involvement from their field techs and project managers inside the actual software — and the results showed.
“FOUNDATION has definitely helped us save time on reporting,” Schneider said.
And FOUNDATION’s features for managing divisionalized accounts helped Air Control run all its businesses under one financial statement.
Field Access That Closes the Loop
Using FOUNDATION, field techs and project managers gained direct access to the tools they needed, without routing everything through the office.
“Our field guys can clock in and out of their jobs right away and we can automatically sync those timestamps to that job,” Schneider said.
That extends to inventory, where serialized parts and flat-rate service codes are built directly into FOUNDATION, ready for project managers to bill their customers when they’re out on the job.
By also generating purchase orders right from the job site, project managers save time for everyone.
“It’s nice because you can get into FOUNDATION from anywhere,” Schneider said. “It’s really easy to work from home if I need to, and the guys in the field can see the information whenever they need it.”
Payroll Without the Bottleneck
Before switching to FOUNDATION, payroll was its own problem. It lived in a separate, single-license system, based out of New Zealand.
“Every time that we tried to get a service call or ask for help for something, they were 12 hours off from us,” Schneider said. “So, it was either paying nighttime fees or nobody was there.”
Moving payroll into FOUNDATION eliminated the single-license limitation of their old system.
“Now we can update people’s payroll whenever we need to,” Schneider said.
Certified payroll reporting, once done entirely by hand, is now automatic.
And paper pay stubs are gone, too. With digital access, all of Air Control’s workers have instant access to their payroll data, eliminating the need to print and mail out paychecks.
“With FOUNDATION, everything’s connected, and there’s better visibility for everyone,” Schneider said.
Growth Without Growing Pains
Since making the switch, Air Control has kept every division working from the same page — accounting and payroll alongside project management, all driving in the same direction.
“The whole thing all easily flows together.” Schneider said.
As the company continues to grow across their multiple trades and industries, Schneider looks forward to exploring more of what FOUNDATION can do.
“At Air Control, we are very centered on quality,” Schneider said. “We want to make sure we’re doing the best we can do.”
That’s the difference FOUNDATION has made — a construction-specific accounting software flexible enough to accommodate Air Control’s range of trades to help achieve their business goals.
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