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With over 10 years of success building custom homes, Mountain Construction & Management Company knows how to properly manage high-end construction projects to yield the best results. Since 2002, owners Bart and Ted Thomas have combined their knowledge and experience to deliver top quality homes in select markets across the country. The company focuses on innovation, exceptional detail, and the latest in technology, and their homes range in price from $1.5 to $55 million.
Regardless of the project size, Mountain Construction & Management has a proven track record of finishing projects on time and within defined budgets. They do this by tracking costs in real time. From daily receipts to vendor invoices, the team identifies all purchase-related documents with standard AIA cost codes and matches them to monthly client bills. But they faced several challenges in the process.
Organizing up to 500 vendor invoices or more during the course of a month takes a considerable amount of time to handle and process. Also critical was organizing these processed documents in a manner that made the most sense to clients. Knowing these challenges, Ted began searching the Web for an electronic solution that could capture the documents and match them to the proper customer bill. This led him to the Content Central document-management system by Ademero.
Keep in mind, technology is no stranger to Mountain Construction & Management. While each project’s features are client-specific, they often incorporate high-tech integrated systems in the homes they build. As Ted says, technology is just as important in their office. “In terms of being able to run the business, technology is crucial for allowing us to manage our job costs, and that’s why I went to Ademero so I could tie my job-costing system into a document management system and have that actual invoice at my fingertips whenever I needed it.”
They quickly moved their customer-billing process to Content Central, scanning invoices from vendors directly into the system, and accepting electronic invoices when available. Workflow rules behind the scenes match these purchase-related
accounts-payable documents with accounts-receivable client bills. When it’s time to produce a bill, they electronically gather all related documents and combine them in an archive file for the customer. Each document has a meaningful filename, which allows them to sort by vendor name and invoice number, and customers can quickly verify each line item on the bill.
Mountain Construction & Management realized a 6-week return on their investment, and they improved their real-time reporting and tracking system. Speaking about these benefits, Ted explains, “I had a lot more visibility on expected job costs for the next bill. I had an idea of how much my client was expecting to be billed.”
Along with this immediate need for client billing, the company has leveraged their document-management software for automated fax distribution, job-status reporting, and accounts-payable check archiving.