Success Stories
A&D Automatic Gate and Access
A&D Automatic Gate and Access is a licensed contractor in California and Nevada. The company builds and installs all types of gate systems for private residences, multi-family dwellings (apartments, condominiums, and townhouses), and commercial and industrial projects. A&D has been operating since 1975 and has offices in Northern California and Las Vegas.
Challenges
A&D Automatic Gate needed to control much more than just accounting; the company needed to manage service and installation efficiently.
Solution
Solution A&D Automatic Gate chose American Contractor Service Management to streamline its billing, service agreements, renewals, and much more.
Results
With American Contractor, A&D Automatic Gate enjoys increased productivity with automated handling of service agreements.
The Right Fit for Service Management
For more than a decade, A&D has been using Maxwell Systems™ American Contractor™. Controller Bob Schumaker, who was part of the purchasing committee, recalls that A&D had an accounting product that worked “if you tweaked it” but the product lacked much-needed service capabilities.
“We were using an accounting-only product,” said Schumaker, “and we needed to manage installation, service, and accounting.”
Maximizing Service Department Productivity
Today A&D uses American Contractor Service Management to streamline its billing, service agreements, and renewals. Billing can be handled by dispatchers, who simply enter resolutions and detail items prior to generating invoices with American Contractor’s automated billing capabilities. This saves time for A&D over the previous method, where hand-written work orders were sent to accounting administrators for entry followed by invoice generation.
Service agreements, or preventative maintenance contracts, are also streamlined for A&D through American Contractor Service Management.
“The system tells us who should get a visit in a given month per their service agreement,” said Schumaker. “We don’t have to look through files and figure out who is due for service, which saves us a lot of time.”
In addition, A&D experiences greater efficiency when handling renewals. “We run Renewals Reports two months in advance,” Schumaker explains. “If you know that you have 20 places to visit for preventative maintenance during the month, these visits can be scheduled along with service calls for increased productivity.”
Tracking histories by location for service contracts is yet another benefit that A&D receives from American Contractor Service Management. “The system allows us to track histories and to look at our customers and locations with better information,” Schumaker explained.
Service Management ROI
Where return on investment is concerned, Schumaker explains that the most relevant ROI for A&D’s service department is in the form of increased productivity: “We can dispatch more technicians over a larger area with fewer people by using the Dispatch Board. The Dispatch Board makes everyone–the dispatchers and the service techs–more productive.”

