Published January 26, 2023 . 7 mins read

Foundation Accounting Software user Root Integrated Systems isn’t your typical construction company

With offices in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Root handles the design, engineering, installation, equipment-procurement and servicing/repair of a wide array of integrated audio-visual technologies.

These complex, multiparty projects include large conference rooms that bring people together in virtual and on-site workspaces; cloud-based training and educational systems for public and private entities; large-scale digital signage and video walls; and secure command-and-control/dispatch centers for government agencies.

While the typical Root Integrated Systems project might not involve a muddy construction site crisscrossed by excavators, backhoes and bulldozers, many of the company’s data needs are right in line with those of construction contractors everywhere.

Root began rolling out a raft of dashboards from the ProNovos Analytics Marketplace in spring 2022.

“Now I can see profit margins for every job without having to pull reports, export them to Excel, build pivot tables and graphs, and scroll through it all myself,” she said. “ProNovos allows me to see right away where profit is dipping. I can quickly figure out what’s going on.”

Farley has also used ProNovos to streamline sales reporting.

“Before, I would assemble, publish and email the sales report every couple of weeks,” Farley noted. “Now our salespeople just sign into ProNovos and pull up that data themselves to see what’s happening with their sales.”

Before the contractor rolled out the platform, personnel such as salespeople and PMs routinely pinged the accounting team with requests for information such as the latest cost numbers for a particular project.

“If they needed that information immediately for a meeting, they might send me a message on Microsoft Teams and I would need to interrupt what I was doing, go pull the numbers and send them,” Farley said. “Now there’s no longer any need for that. Everyone has access to Foundation data in ProNovos.”

The system filters out sensitive information, such as payroll reports, and gives PMs, support technicians and salespeople exactly the information they need to see, often using data visualizations that are easier to understand.

“If you’re not an exec or a trained accountant, you may not want to scroll through columns and rows of numbers,” Farley said. “Salespeople might just want to see a bar graph of where they stand with their quotas. We had that information before, but it was underused outside the accounting team because it wasn’t easily digestible.”

COLLABORATING WITH PRONOVOS

Both accountants and C-suite execs at the company are using customized versions of the ProNovos work-in-process, change-order analysis and executive dashboards. Root also is leveraging the platform for descriptive construction analytics such as materials and labor tracking.

“The executive dashboard is one of the best ProNovos features,” Farley said. “It puts in one spot data that otherwise would be in separate places. It’s super-important to us because it lets us see how we’re doing right now.”