The Dashboard Every Contractor Needs
Are you constantly chasing receipts, approvals, and job cost data across disconnected systems?
In this episode, Wade Carpenter and Stephen Brown walk you through the CONMOS — the Construction Multiplier Operating System — a custom-built dashboard that gives contractors, project managers, and bookkeepers real-time financial visibility from one place.
From job costing and Profit First tracking to vendor compliance and time tracking, discover how the right system can stop the chaos and multiply your profitability.
Sign up for group coaching to get your Cash Flow MRI
Topics covered on this episode include:
- 00:00 Stop Chasing Info
- 00:27 Meet The Hosts
- 01:02 Firefighting Reality
- 02:07 Introducing CONMOS
- 03:28 Owner Dashboard Tour
- 03:50 Project Manager Workflow
- 05:07 Purchasing And Profit First
- 06:34 Accuracy And Adoption Questions
- 08:29 Receipts Time And Job Drilldowns
- 11:14 Implementation And Integration
- 18:18 Compliance And Vendor Tracking
- 21:31 Availability And Wrap Up
- 22:17 Final Thoughts And Subscribe
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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com
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TRANSCRIPT
Wade Carpenter: [00:00:00] How much of your day is spent chasing information? Which job was this receipt for? What was this change order? Did the project manager approve it? Why doesn’t accounting know something the field knew three days ago? And here’s the crazy part, most of the time somebody already knows the answer.
The problem is getting that information in the right place at the right time. So what if the system did the chasing and only brought you the decisions that actually needed a human?
This is the Contractor Success Forum. I’m Wade Carpenter with Carpenter Company CPAs, alongside Stephen Brown with McDaniel-Whitley Bonding and Insurance.
Stephen, a few weeks back, we did an episode where you grilled me about the pains of getting good information from a contractor’s perspective.
You sorta acted it out and a little too well. Made me sweat a little bit, but- … you, uh, made me work for it. But, with that said, contractors live this every day.
So how much time do contractors waste every day trying to get good information to run their businesses and still struggle [00:01:00] to find good information in their business?
Stephen Brown: Well, like anything, Wade, when something gets too frustrating, you kinda put that on the side and you deal with your most current emergency. You’re putting out fires. Yeah, you heard that expression. You’re running around putting out a fire here, and you don’t have to live that way.
You can go, “Yeah, right. Well, maybe when I get these projects finished and this done, my number one thing is I get this project started.”
Whatever it is, that’s a fire. It may not be a problem, but it may be what you consider the number one issue to deal with. And of course, it’s your company, you’re exactly right on that.
But how comfortable are you relying on the information that you need?
Wade Carpenter: So the way I see it, we talk about having good information, and owner having a dashboard. They’d love to have this information, but they need to get it real time, and part of that episode where we did was there’s a lot of pain in trying to get the information.
The idea is, how do we get [00:02:00] that information quickly, easily, where we’re not bothering the contractor all day, but we gotta have good information to do that.
And so after that other episode, people reached out and asked me like, “Can I see this thing?” And we are not selling this to the public right now.
This is only for our internal clients, but it’s really starting to make a difference in how fast we can get information.
When we have it in one system, I’ll show more about that in just a minute, but I know you were already asking about the name of it. The CONMOS is the Construction Multiplier Operating System.
And so what we’re trying to do is put in one place, and I’ll get to it, but where they can see on their phone where they are.
I just wanted to walk through this mock-up of it, of what we got in place. It looks slightly different in our system ’cause we got a little better gauges and stuff like that.
But, I didn’t wanna show anybody’s real information, so-
Stephen Brown: Right …
Wade Carpenter: –just trying to show what we’re talking about.
Stephen Brown: Why do you call it magnifier and [00:03:00] not–
Wade Carpenter: Multiplier, yeah. So what I see, there’s a lot of one-owner, construction companies that the owner is doing everything. They may get some help.
What I said the other time, like, okay, you can have a bookkeeper. Doesn’t matter if they’re in the office or they’re across the country from you. If they can’t get that information, then, you’re not gonna get good information back from them.
You’re not gonna get your percent complete and your job costing that you really want. So this is sort of like, how can we put it in one place and make it super simple?
I was gonna show the dashboard real quick. We’re trying to show the owner where are they at. Sometimes they want some kind of dashboard with where’s our current jobs, and what’s the cash flow over the next eight weeks.
And a lot of times we’ll build this differently from, say, a project manager. The owner doesn’t want the Project Manager in their QuickBooks, but they need information to run their jobs.
So we’ve got it, the system to where, if Bob Smith is the project manager, we can track these and all he can see are his jobs, and he can drill into some [00:04:00] of the detail of like what’s happening on that particular job.
And we can drill into what’s going on, plus we’ll get into this, but we may need certain information from that project manager. It’s like, okay, is this bill approved? The quantity’s right or the cost, those kind of things.
This saves part of that deal where the project manager gets the bill, but it’s sitting in their inbox and it doesn’t get to accounting, so it’s not recorded, and then all of a sudden we got this bill for $75,000 that we didn’t know anything about. The owner gets blindsided.
Again, this is sort of high level today, just demo. But the bookkeeper has different things and they have things that we’re trying to reconcile and work with them, like how many items are we still trying to chase down? Sometimes it’s the bookkeeper, sometimes we have to talk to the owner, whoever it is.
The purpose is, let’s get it in one place and not trade emails and deal with portals and deal with texts and all that stuff, where they can look at it on their phone.
They may not want to show their internal bookkeeper what’s going on with the full balance [00:05:00] sheet or the Profit and Loss or whatever it is. So this allows us to sort of tailor what they can see.
We had the purchasing side. Some of the bigger companies may have a purchasing manager, and they’re trying to stay on top of things. A lot of people hate purchase orders, but if you can get a purchase order in place that you can get your vendors to use and the stuff gets ordered, it makes job costing so much easier.
Having somebody tracking the bills out there that don’t have a PO and, you know, are the quantities right? If you’ve got those kind of systems in place where you can readily, like, okay, have we already been billed for this? Or have they billed us for more quantity than we…
and last one I’m gonna hit real quick is the Profit First dashboard. A lot of these are custom, but some of these we’ve got canned where we can add really quickly.
But, just trying to see where you drill into your job costs. If your current allocation percentage is, say, 65% and your job expenses are running, say, [00:06:00] 67%, you’re sort of getting in this danger zone.
There’s gonna be fluctuations in that, but this allows us to work with an owner and say, “Okay, well, we’re not covering enough for tax,” or, “Your operating expenses are running high.” I’ll talk about that all the time, where you get into growth mode, this OpEx starts creeping up.
Let me take a breath and let you talk. This is a quick overview of the top level. What do you think?
Stephen Brown: I love it, and I love how you have the red line just like a tachometer. Red line means your engine’s gonna blow. I love that gauge.
As a contractor, my first question is how accurate is it? How often is it updated? How do you tell if one of the units that has access and is putting in information into the system is doing their job or not?
What red flags could show up on your dashboard that something important needs to be done that hasn’t been done by one of your employees? And also, I’d be obsessed with looking at the profit gauge.
Well, [00:07:00] yesterday it was 21%, now it’s 20, now it’s 19. What’s going on, you know? And then freak out about it and drive everybody crazy over that.
I guess that’s where Carpenter & Company CPAs is there to help sort through all of these kind of questions. My first impression was what is this gonna do to your employees? Is this gonna help them, or is it gonna make them crazy?
Is it gonna allow you to micromanage them more, or is it gonna be a real tool for everyone in the organization?
Wade Carpenter: This is where we’re trying to give the owner the real-time numbers they want, or their project managers. But this helps everybody.
Number one, like my accounting team can be a lot more efficient if that receipt in that field supervisor’s is not shoved up in the visor of their dash in their truck. They have no idea if we can get it in one system where they can report it really quickly, snap a picture and in five seconds this is what it is. So that’s the purpose behind this.
Stephen Brown: Well, and that’s also my point, Wade, is that the [00:08:00] system behind it is being able to drive real time accurate numbers.
Wade Carpenter: Right.
Stephen Brown: Every bit of this is… That’s the power of it.
Wade Carpenter: Just so you know, some of this stuff is proprietary so I’m not showing all the capabilities of this thing. But it’s more of like the idea, how do we get the information real quick? And how do we not bug the owner?
They don’t wanna be in the field all day and doing paperwork all night or chasing emails down as like, “Okay, we sent you a suspense list.” Well, I don’t know what that was, but I mean, I’m gonna get there.
We have different receivables, dashboards, and depending on however who you want to see what, we can break this down into different place.
Like you see your receivables or your accounts payable and what’s due this week. And ultimately part of hours tracking too.
We also have the time tracking too, but-
Stephen Brown: Love that. Yeah
Wade Carpenter: I’m jumping all over the place, I realize that. But the idea in this is that your hours by workers’ comp or how are you tracking. You need to be able to see that information really quickly.
The [00:09:00] idea is you’re keeping your handle on it. And I’m gonna get to the part where dealing with the stuff really quickly, you know, drilling into the projects.
This is where we can say, “Okay, this is the project” and if we got questions about the project manager, we can know exactly what’s going on with that.
And so if we drill into this particular job, here’s the cost codes and this is what the budget committed actual and where are we at on that kind of stuff.
Well when we’ve got a question like this, like I can just say approve it or change it or whatever. It makes it so much simpler than having, okay, we got a payable system, we got techs, and we got a receipt management system.
We got a time tracking system that we’re all over the place, and that’s where we’re sort of like trying to figure out how we streamline this and make it less work for everybody involved to be able to give you these good reports. Does that make sense?
Stephen Brown: Yeah.
Wade Carpenter: So again, there’s different parts of it, and whether it’s just, okay, we’ve [00:10:00] got something that hit your credit card, or whatever it is.
We’ve got places in here where they go on their phone and just snap a picture, and then they upload it and they can pick between the current jobs or whatever.
But my team if they get the data, it’s something that came through the credit card or the bank or whatever, we don’t know, but we can filter it like, okay, this G needs a job. This needs, you know, what is it? Or we need a cost code breakdown, that kind of stuff.
Stephen Brown: I love it.
Wade Carpenter: I know this is not the sexy stuff that they want to talk about, but this is the building blocks of having good information.
Stephen Brown: That’s right. Well, it is, and it is sexy. Beause here’s the thing, as a contractor running a company, I’m gonna be able to get the information I need quickly, and you don’t have to assume who knows what.
You’re like, “Hey, this is your job, and you didn’t know to do this? Seriously?” This brings everybody onto a common level playing field, and it seems to me also be fantastic when you bring someone new for your back office support [00:11:00] to be on the same page.
You don’t have to constantly be re-educating everyone. This is the information that we have to have to run our business, and this is your part in it. I think it’s great. I’m really excited about it, Wade.
My comment would be is, how hard is it for you to implement something like this with a contractor? Especially dependent on the management system they’re currently using. And I would think the whole process of setting this up would also expose certain things that need to be fixed that are worth their weight in gold.
Like you said, not being able to tie this to a particular receipt to a certain project doesn’t seem sexy right now, but it’s the building blocks of this whole system.
Wade Carpenter: So that’s where a lot of times we come to… I mean, we’ve had clients, this particular one I was talking about last podcast, $35 million, had no systems.
They were basically giving it to their accountant at the end of the year, and they wanted good job costing, but that’s where actually the next one in the line [00:12:00] is the time and the crew. Especially if you’re a heavier, self-performing job with your own crew, your labor is a huge chunk of your job cost.
You may have some kind of time tracking, even like QuickBooks Online time tracking, whatever, but if it doesn’t get to the job or we got a time tracking that goes to ADP or Paychex, I’m not knocking anybody, but it’s another system that’s not integrated.
From our standpoint, you could have a Clockify or ClockShark or all these that do time tracking, and yes, they all talk to each other, but if it’s not integrated in the system, this is some of our pain points that is translating to some efficiencies, not only for my team, but the ability to give my contractors real-time information.
So we’ve got it where we can set up the time tracking and they’re reporting it directly to us. They can approve it, and we can job cost it all in the same system, and we’re not chasing a bunch of things or we get something from one system.
We got [00:13:00] one that was like 900, 1,000 lines long that we get turned in every week that has job costing on it. Really poorly formatted and we had to build some systems to be able to translate this number into a format where we could import it.
And we kind of said like, “Okay, we’re building a system for this time tracking.” Made things so much easier ’cause they were doing a lot of work on their end to get that, and we were doing a lot of work on our end to get them properly job costed labor.
So that’s one part of it. Does this sort of make sense?
Stephen Brown: Yeah, it does. I love it.
Wade Carpenter: Some of the other stuff like the payables, purchase orders That’s where in more disjointed systems, I mean, I don’t wanna knock anybody’s systems, but we have payables and maybe they’re running like purchase orders out of something like Procore or whatever.
But then the payable systems comes through some of the other ones that I’m gonna get in trouble if I keep using people’s names, but I’m not trying to knock anybody.
It’s just, you’ve gotta get this tied to that, and then it [00:14:00] comes to the ledger. If we can get it all together where the team can look at, not just my team, but in contractors in-house team, it’s so much more efficient for us as well as them, and gives us the ability to get these real time numbers.
Stephen Brown: It also seems to me that whoever’s operating in their certain tab of expertise that they’re in charge of, when they’re having problems or information is not flowing, or communicating properly, that’s the time to go in and fix the system once and for all. I would think these always need tweaking.
Wade Carpenter: Well, a lot of them do and this was sort of my brainchild because we were building apps for purchase orders or receipt management.
You can go out there and get all kind of different receipt or, you know, Dext, Receipt Bank. There’s a QuickBooks Receipt Manager, but the problem with those is they only work with the chart of accounts, and you need the cost codes.
So we were building systems like that and then I was [00:15:00] like, “Okay, I’ve got the building blocks of… Put it all in one system.” Sometimes make changes slowly in a company not because we’d love to like, plug it in first time, you know, day one, but practically speaking, you got a company that’s used to doing things one way, or the owner’s doing all the work.
Once they change the habits, they get a little more time freed up, and that’s where a lot of this goes to the episodes we did on leverage. It’s like you gotta have time, and you can either hire for that, you can get some things done by AI–
You were grilling me on that podcast, I made you buy that software. I didn’t make you buy that software but by the way. But software’s only as good as if you get it implemented and that’s part of the issue is you can spend three times as much on the software on a consultant to get it set up right. That’s where we’re just trying to put all this together.
Stephen Brown: I love it. And you know how you tie in also project management and estimating, with the actual numbers once you get the job. This comes in handy when you [00:16:00] get the job and also when you’re bidding the job, because you can look at historical data too on the other projects you’ve already completed, of course, have that at your fingertips.
But I see how this whole theory of CONMOS, which I do like the name now. I still think of it as construction management operating system, but that’s not true because it’s not managing–
Wade Carpenter: It’s construction multipliers … each project.
Yeah.
So you’re trying to multiply the effect of that owner, the contractor.
Stephen Brown: Yeah. And I like that. I’ve already embraced it, multiplier and I’ve got it in my head because, you know listeners, Wade has just kinda laid this all on my lap and all of our lap, and I love it.
I’m trying to think like a contractor would think when he’s looking at this, and I would say they’re gonna think, “Wow, this would be a dream of mine to have this system in place and be able to trust the information.”
In the last podcast we did, Wade, it [00:17:00] was about trusting the numbers. They might reconcile, everything might look perfect, but you don’t trust the numbers. And what a wonderful way to have every system help you check those numbers, and when the numbers don’t feel right, that you could get an answer that much quicker.
There’s a lot of power in that, and there’s a lot of profit in that. I think all of us excited, and I’m have to say this, and you may not give me credit for this, but maybe this was four or five years ago when I mentioned you were the whole idea of a dashboard was, an operating system, dashboard in your mind.
And in my mind, it was a dashboard on a car that was giving you real information. Is my engine gonna blow? Do I have enough gas to get me there? Am I exceeding the speed limit? Yeah. How many miles do I have on my car? Is it so old that I need to think about replacing it? I love the gauges.
Anybody that likes any kind of vehicle loves the gauges, but I [00:18:00] also like the charts too, and the colors of what they tell you and how it gets your attention.
Wade Carpenter: Well, the dashboard is only as good as the information. There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into this, and this has been a few years of building one-off systems.
Some of the things that this whole thing, which again, I can’t show a real contractor. But when we talk about compliance, I’m mainly talking about vendors.
So one of the hardest things that a lot of times we have problems with is getting 1099s out the door, because the contractors haven’t kept up and got those W-9s.
If we got a system where we got a new vendor and they can register and they can put their W-9 information. The other thing that I get asked this all the time, but the certificates of insurance.
So we’ve got a thing where it will ingest the certificates of insurance and it tells are these people compliant or what are we missing?
We can also do lien waivers, but that’s not our main business, but we can track those kind of things too.
Having this in one system, the best way to get somebody to [00:19:00] paid or they wanna get paid. You say, “Well, we gotta have a W-9 or we gotta have that certificate of insurance before you give me a dime.”
This gives the contractor a way to like say, “Okay, it’s not my fault, it’s Wade’s fault. He’s re- busting my hump. We gotta have this.” But that makes life easier. The contractor’s not chasing people in January that have disappeared.
Stephen Brown: How much better would it be if you’re at a job and you ran into a sub that you really like and depend on and you could say, “Hey, by the way, we still don’t have this, and I know you’re gonna put a paid request in on the 20th.” Just wanted to bring your attention. I know so and so’s reached out to so and so about this. yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. You know, we don’t wanna slow that down. And by the way, I think this compliance health, it might show how geeky I am, but I think it’s sexy. I really do.
I think it’s wonderful because of course it falls right in the realm of what I do with certificates of insurance expiring and tracking them. But I think the most important part is payments [00:20:00] blocked category. Payments are gonna be blocked to the amount of X amount.
Do we care about it? Yeah, we care. Because, we wanna keep everybody happy if we can, and we wanna abide by our contract and what we’ve agreed to do, but this isn’t there.
Wade Carpenter: Well the certificates of insurance, again, the contractors, they hate dealing with the compliance and that kind of stuff.
But, when your workers’ comp comes due and they’ve ignored the first notice and they’re at a deadline and then they like, “Oh, help me get this thing together.”
If we’re keeping it up as we go, it’s so much easier. It will actually track the contractors. It’s like, okay, if it’s expiring in 30 days, we can let the contractor know, reach out or depending on how they want us to do it we can contact them as well.
I know this one’s getting longer than I intended to be, and there’s also some things like the Cashflow MRI, It’s proprietary information that I usually would put the Profit First tracking and where we can show some of that seasonality stuff.
We have it where [00:21:00] we can see it on our phone now. And yes, they can work with it on their phone, but we’re working on getting it in the iPhone, whatever Apple Store and the Google Play Store.
We have a working app right now. The idea behind it is if we can just say, “Okay, here it is. Here’s the job it goes with. Approve it.” That makes our job as well as a contractor. That’s why I’m saying contractor multipliers. Like we don’t have enough hours in the day. Well, if they can take two seconds to say approve or hold it or whatever, that’s the idea.
Stephen Brown: Fantastic.
Wade Carpenter: This is not available to the public. It’s only for our clients, but, I did wanna sort of show that.
We’d love to talk to you if you’re interested, but the idea is if you’re out there and don’t have good information and you can’t rely on this, or your project managers need some of this money, need to understand where their money is on their project, it’s like if you’re constantly fighting with your vendors on your purchase orders or not tracking and matching.
That’s where I was going with it today. And I hope I made some [00:22:00] sense.
Stephen Brown: No, I think it could be fantastic, and I think project managers would love it, too. Every bit of it, the owner providing them accurate information, project manager, the bookkeeper, purchasing, they’re all getting the same information and the information that they need. So thank you, Wade.
Wade Carpenter: Okay. Well, whether you wanna talk to me or not, it’s just think about your system out there and if they’re so disjointed that you’re doing stuff in Excel spreadsheets and pieces here and there, and you can’t get the data you need, whether it’s us or somebody else, nobody else has this ’cause we built this.
Whether it is getting the right software in place that talk to each other. Think about that and maybe, think about the health of your business and how not ignoring your books may be affecting the health of your company. So that’s my thought for the day.
All right. Well, thanks for entertaining this with me today, Stephen. If you enjoyed this, got something out of it, we do this every single week.
If you would [00:23:00] like, share, subscribe. It always helps the channel out. We will see you on the next show.