C.C. Carlton

A $200M contractor running on Excel

C.C. Carlton Industries has served Central Texas since 1993 from offices in Austin and Liberty Hill. It is a mid-size civil contractor doing $200–250 million a year, mostly for cities and public entities: asphalt, wet and dry utilities, lift stations, retaining walls and the site work that comes before vertical construction. Jobs range from $300,000 to $27 million, and the company is prequalified for TxDOT work.

When Pablo joined as CFO from a multibillion-dollar public construction company, he inherited a system that had stopped being maintained. Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate was still running, but every report was built in Excel, receivables could only be trusted from the module and never from the general ledger, and each month the bank required a reconciling entry of more than a million dollars just to balance.

“I wasn't able to make sure the software was doing the right thing. As the person responsible for the accounting, that was really scary to me. I couldn't see the detail in the GL. I couldn't track anything unless I was using the modules and not the GL — it should have been the other way around.”Pablo, CFO, C.C. Carlton

The owner had built the company on old-fashioned methods that worked for him, but he wanted it to be better and relied on Pablo to make it so. Getting off Sage became a three-year project.

Why NetSuite — and why it needed BlueCollar

The shortlist was SAP, Sage Intacct and NetSuite. SAP was familiar from Pablo's prior company; the final decision came down to Intacct versus NetSuite. NetSuite won on fit, with one catch: the original quote left the construction layer out. NetSuite on its own is accounting — it does not follow the job or produce WIP. Adding BlueCollar Projects closed that gap, and the implementation ran cleanly from there.

“The problem with NetSuite by itself is that it doesn't follow the job. It doesn't do WIP — it's accounting, 100 percent. Blue Collar covers those construction things.”Pablo, CFO, C.C. Carlton

Go-live under audit pressure

Midway through the implementation the annual audit was moved up by a month to six weeks, costing the team the two to three weeks it had planned for cleanup before go-live. BlueCollar's Carlo and the delivery team stepped in to cover the gap and get the company through both.

“It was a very stressful situation. We lost three weeks of what we had to do. You guys stepped up. We were really happy with you.”Pablo, CFO, C.C. Carlton

Six months after go-live the fear is gone. Revenue recognition, which was still manual, is being brought into BlueCollar Projects this month. A custom billing report across all clients is one of the reports Pablo runs every day, and a small change to the WIP report — applying filters before the data loads — was turned around by BlueCollar's Luke shortly after he asked for it.

What's next

The company is growing, and the systems change is already helping. The remaining request — handling warranty or trailing cost on jobs that closed in a prior year — is on BlueCollar's roadmap, and in Pablo's words it's “not a big deal. It's worth the change.”

“We are very happy with the change, to be honest. It's way better than what we had.”Pablo, CFO, C.C. Carlton