They were running a $3M+ business without being able to see it clearly
This commercial painting contractor in the Southeast had been growing steadily — 140+ jobs in their project management system, a mix of residential and commercial clients, national accounts alongside local work. But the visibility wasn't there.
Estimating was happening in spreadsheets, manually — every bid required pulling data from multiple places and reconstructing a budget by hand. Job costing was a rearview mirror exercise: you found out if a job was profitable after it was done. Invoicing for larger commercial jobs required AIA 702/703 forms that were being drafted from scratch each time.
They had JobTread for project management and QuickBooks for accounting. Both were active. Neither was connected to anything that gave the owner a real-time picture of the business.
"They were paying for two good platforms and getting maybe 20% of the value. The data was there — it just wasn't surfaced anywhere useful."
A live financial dashboard connected to their actual data
The first priority was visibility. I built a financial ops dashboard pulling live data from both JobTread and QuickBooks — no manual exports, no weekly updates. It refreshes automatically.
The dashboard tracks pipeline value by job status, revenue vs. annual goal, gross profit percentage across active jobs, and AR outstanding — all in one view. The owner can check it on a phone in 30 seconds and know exactly where the business stands.
An AI estimating tool that turns a scope description into a JobTread budget
Estimating was the biggest time sink. The owner or estimator would review a job, write up a scope, then manually translate that into a JobTread budget — line item by line item. Every estimate took the same setup work, regardless of size.
I built an AI-powered estimating tool: describe the scope in plain text (or record a voice note on-site), and the tool generates a structured budget estimate and pushes it directly into JobTread as a draft budget — ready to review and adjust, not start from scratch.
The tool supports both typed scope descriptions and voice input — useful for estimators on job sites who want to capture scope notes before they leave the property. The budget pushes to JobTread automatically, tagged with the job and ready for review.
A per-job scorecard showing cost burn, AR status, and invoicing completion
The financial dashboard shows the business at altitude. The job scorecard goes one level deeper — it tracks each active job in real time, showing cost burn vs. budget, what's been invoiced, what's been collected, and whether the job is trending profitable or not.
The scorecard updates daily from live JobTread and QuickBooks data. When a job's cost burn is outpacing its invoicing, the owner sees it immediately — not at job close when there's nothing to do about it.
From zero ops visibility to a full platform in 8 weeks
"The goal wasn't to replace what they were already doing. It was to make it actually work — and give the owner visibility he could act on, not just data he had to go looking for."
The full stack
Everything was built on top of the contractor's existing platforms. No new software subscriptions. No migrations. Just the connective tissue that was missing.
Running your business on spreadsheets and gut feel?
If you're on JobTread, Buildertrend, or QuickBooks and not getting real value from them, I can help. I work with specialty contractors to build the ops infrastructure they actually need — scoped, fixed-price, and delivered in weeks.
Or email directly: andres@tradeopslab.com