MAG Builders

Forty-five QuickBooks files and a company about to grow ten-fold

MAG Builders has spent 25 years building custom homes and, more recently, commercial projects across the Denver area. As the company moved from 20 to 30 doors a year toward more complex developments and a target of 500 homes in the next two years, its accounting ran on QuickBooks — a separate file for every development LLC. At the peak, 45 of them.

“It was a nightmare. Even from a navigation perspective, getting out of our main file and into this new LLC and this new QuickBooks file — it was a disaster. You can only imagine the consolidation on top of that.”Chris Booker, CPA, CFO, MAG Builders

Chris Booker came to MAG from public accounting as controller and was promoted to CFO on January 1, 2026. Scaling made the decision for him: with multiple projects running at once and leadership needing real-time visibility into financial and project performance, QuickBooks was not going to support where the company was headed.

Why NetSuite — and what sold it

Booker's public-accounting clients had run Oracle and NetSuite, so he had already seen the reports that came out of it. He also looked at Sage and at the higher-tier ERP Intuit was preparing to offer QuickBooks customers. NetSuite aligned on visibility, on integrating project-level systems into one, and on the ability to scale without another switch in five years.

“What sold us after our initial couple of demos was Blue Collar for construction and real estate. We hadn't seen anything so tailored to what we were doing — from the loan and draw processes to seeing budget versus actual on each project. That was the tipping point.”Chris Booker, CPA, CFO, MAG Builders

Ten months to get the foundation right

The implementation ran about ten months, and MAG used all of it. The priority was data structure from day one — chart of accounts and cost codes — because bad data in NetSuite is the QuickBooks problem at a bigger scale. The second priority was alignment: the accounting team understood ERP systems, but lead superintendents and project managers had to be brought along through demos and hands-on sandbox time, with a standing rule that anyone who was not comfortable should raise a hand.

“Implementation wasn't just about installing a new system. It helped us understand how to drive our company forward. We'd been doing it the same way for ten years — we had an opportunity to make sure we were doing it the right way.”Chris Booker, CPA, CFO, MAG Builders

Four months live

MAG went live in January 2026. The biggest change so far is seeing a phase run over while it is happening, not after the project sells. Booker can watch month-end shake out in real time and ask where the shortfall can be recovered in the next phase. The second change is automation: the AP processor who used to key roughly a thousand invoices a week now finishes by two in the afternoon and is asking for more to do.

What's next

The company has only started on automation. With 500 homes on the horizon and commercial work growing, the plan is to keep eliminating manual processes and let the system scale with the business rather than switch again.