Published February 8, 2021 . 0 min read

Prior to signing up with ProNovos in 2020, Zernco, Inc., already had a project-management platform for handling RFIs, drawings, photos, submittals, safety forms, daily logs and the like, and President Scott Marko and his teams were happy with the way the software performed in the field.

At the same time, Zernco’s robust project pipeline was producing a lot of data. With a strong focus on retail and business facilities such as restaurants, c-stores and supermarkets, Wichita, Kansas-based Zernco has built more than 7,000 projects in 34 states since 1991.

To handle all of that data more efficiently, Marko wanted the company’s project information to flow right into Zernco’s construction accounting system. This would eliminate the need to manually enter data into both systems. In addition, admins would no longer have to spend time rechecking those double entries to make sure the numbers lined up.

Since the project-management platform Zernco was using couldn’t do that, Marko began looking for another option. He discovered ProNovos through a fellow member of the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA).

Today, Zernco pulls accounting data into ProNovos in real time. This allows project managers to do all of their cost-to-complete forecasting in the new platform. “The project managers can make adjustments to line items in the project budget, and those adjustments then show up in our work-in -progress report,” Marko explains. “It gives us the ability to see the financial health of each project at a glance. Before, the process of making adjustments to forecasted costs-to-complete was very manual. The integration of the two software platforms is where the time savings comes in.”

The company president reports saving at least $18,000 a year on labor costs as a result of eliminating those double entries. “When you combine that with ProNovos’ much-lower software fees, we’re saving at least $50,000 a year,” he said.

With the project-management dashboard up and running, the next step is to finalize Zernco’s new ProNovos-designed WIP dashboard. “We’ll be able to see real-time profitability on all of our current jobs in that dashboard—things like what has been billed and details about the current contract and any change orders.”

Today, despite the economic challenges associated with Covid-19, Zernco is as busy as ever, so having access to those analytics will come in handy, Marko says. Lastly, he has been pleased with ProNovos’ customer service. “How often do you have the CEO of the software provider get on the phone with you to tweak things?” Marko said. “ProNovos has customized these dashboards for us based on our specific needs. A lot of companies won’t do that.”