“Rho went out of its way to ensure every payment transaction our field supervisors incurred accurately mapped to our accounting system in QuickBooks via automation,” Lappin said.
Founded by Alex Lappin, Greater Boston Roofing is a residential roofing construction company serving the Northeast United States. They deliver comprehensive roofing services, including installation and replacement, providing various materials and ensuring auxiliary services such as gutter replacement and structural upgrades for roof longevity and performance.
Lappin worked in the solar industry for several years and experienced first-hand how difficult it was for customers who wanted solar to install it successfully. The biggest challenge: Many residential roofs aren’t properly designed to facilitate solar panel installation. Having years of experience establishing best practices for developing roofing systems that can support solar infrastructure, Lappin set out to start Greater Boston Roofing with the intent of helping the Northeast lead the way in residential solar adoption, one roof at a time.
Greater Boston Roofing has served more than 2000 residential customers, averaging a newly installed roof daily. The team operates five residential roofing crews six days per week, providing a dedicated Project Supervisor at every job site so that customers have a point of contact and quality control expert at every stage of the installation process.
While the company is growing fast, Greater Boston Roofing experienced several finance-related pain points that often challenge construction companies. First, there were times when field teams would need to use corporate cards to purchase supplies for a job, and receipts for those expenses often got lost as contractors moved from job to job.
Greater Boston Roofing’s previous spend management and corporate card provider made field supervisors wait several days for purchases to clear before submitting expense reports. This presented a problem: Field supervisors could be in an entirely different state working on a new project the next day. Imagine remembering what you had for breakfast three days ago, let alone the amount of tile you bought in a different state.
Speaking of receipts, field supervisors generate lots of them and would continuously lose a few along the way. This made month-end reconciliation a nightmare for owner Lappin who had to spend hours chasing down employees. It was unpleasant for each employee who needed more recollection of their paper receipt from three weeks ago.
Regarding accounting, their previous system didn’t align with Greater Boston Roofing’s unique coding system, creating hours of manual work for Alex’s finance team.
“We had another spend management and corporate card provider that wasn’t aligned to our coding system,” Lappin said. “We would have to wait days for purchases to clear so expense reports could be submitted.”
The Rho platform improves Greater Boston Roofing’s spend management and accounting in three ways:
All three capabilities add up to an automated, integrated system that supports the hectic schedules of field supervisors and the financial reporting needs of a business focused on bringing the New England area into a new energy future – one receipt at a time.
The Rho Mobile App lets field supervisors log expenses in real-time and map them to the correct project code to focus on their next project without finding a misplaced receipt.
Rho’s text and email receipt upload feature eliminates this problem by allowing field supervisors to capture them on the go instantly. An added benefit is that all Rho transactions and corresponding receipts flow smoothly into Greater Boston Roofing’s accounting system, eliminating the need for the previous third-party receipt capturing service the company was using – and all free of charge.
Rho’s QuickBooks integration and the ability to create separate budgets for job codes using Rho Budgets made it easier to manage the finances of 8 to 9 project teams working across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine at any one time – and close their books faster by several hours each month.
“Rho went out of its way to ensure every payment transaction our field supervisors incurred accurately mapped to our accounting system in QuickBooks via automation,” Lappin said.