Jackson & Associates General Contractors, Inc. has been serving Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties in South Florida for more than 20 years. As a full-service general contractor, Jackson & Associates is experienced in all aspects of the construction industry ranging from new commercial buildings, high-end residential estates, to the restoration of high rise condominiums. The firm is also well versed in the requirements of medical facilities, innovative in the area of interior finishes and office build-outs, and well skilled in both structural and historic restoration.
Challenges
Jackson & Associates needed a solution to improve how they managed AP, AR, payroll, financials, and reporting. Their off-the-shelf accounting software required duplicate data entry and lacked auditing capabilities, both which hindered productivity and created room for costly errors.
Solution
By using Maxwell Systems American Contractor business management software, the contractor is able to create sub jobs to capture profit on changes wherever possible, streamline data entry for financials and billings, minimize mistakes and maintain audit trail, simplify labor tracking and payroll, and quickly generate reports.
Results
The team at Jackson & Associates can better streamline processes, eliminate redundancies, minimize mistakes and costs, maintain a tight audit trail, and manage all accounting activities with the many capabilities of American Contractor.
The company has enjoyed continuous growth in revenue and an increase of approximately 35% in sales per year since it was founded in 1991. In addition to its experienced staff of 14 and their commitment to high quality craftsmanship, Jackson & Associates can attribute part of its success to the tools it uses on a day-to-day basis to build projects and run its operations. One example is Maxwell Systems™ American Contractor™, which the firm has been using to manage its accounting and payroll since the 1990s.
Joining the company as controller in 2009, Dan Haywood brought an in-depth background in accounting and computer science. Extremely familiar with the various accounting software packages available on the market, Haywood believes that American Contractor is the best in the industry.
The team at Jackson & Associates uses American Contractor for managing its financial operations and workforce. This business management software solution also offers capabilities for estimating and proposal management, project management, equipment management, service management, and procurement/inventory management.
Complete Financial Management
Haywood explained that when a job is won, financials are set up in American Contractor. “We enter our budget into American Contractor, create subcontracts, enter bills using specific job cost codes, and run reports,” said Haywood.
American Contractor helps Jackson & Associates streamline transaction entry (with alerts about questionable entries) and bank reconciliation. In addition, the solution offers a variety of billing forms (including AIA), satisfying the varying needs of the general contracting firm. “We have three ways we invoice,” said Haywood. “We do some time and materials and some manual invoices, but primarily we use the AIA billing method and it works great in American Contractor.”
“We also like the fact that you can create sub jobs in American Contractor,” he added. “Most software applications don’t offer that capability. With American Contractor, we can create different jobs for the same client, but still keep the information together.” For example, if Jackson & Associates is building a home that’s organized through an architect, typically the architect gets paid on the full price of the project. However, if Jackson & Associates makes suggestions that the homeowner likes, which increase the scope of the project, then they are able to set up a sub job and ensure they capture the full profit for that specific change.
Gaining Total Control
At the top of Haywood’s list of American Contractor’s benefits: financial control. “American Contractor keeps us from making mistakes,” explained Haywood. “In QuickBooks, for example, one can make an entry and easily change the data and there are no auditing capabilities to identify who made the changes and why they were made. However, American Contractor is a true construction accounting package that doesn’t let us make changes just because we want to, providing us much greater control of our finances.”
Easily Tracking Labor Costs
American Contractor’s Payroll component allows Jackson & Associates to record work and calculate earnings, benefits, fringes, insurance liabilities, and taxes. “We like the ease of the timecard entry and that we are able to easily apply labor to change orders, pending change orders and cost codes. In this regard, American Contractor is superior to most products I’ve seen.”
Generating Timely Reports
American Contractor enables contractors to generate timely reports and drill down to view transaction details or expand to see a big picture of their financial standings. Jackson & Associates leverages American Contractor to use both the template reports and the customized reports. Every month the accounting team runs AP and AR aging reports, trial balances, P&L reports, balance sheets, jobs in progress ledger, cash payments, all receiving report, and payroll summary reports, among others.
“American Contractor is easy to learn and use,” said Haywood. “It has an intuitive interface and I’m excited to see what the next version has in store.”
