Brief Client Description
- Hammer Engineering
- Industry – Civil Engineering Architectural firm
- Size / type of business – Small private 20 employee firm which focuses on fixed fee and time and material civil engineering projects for government and private businesses
- Core financial pain point – Outgrew their quick books system and had difficultly billing their time and material and fixed fee projects timely. Due to the unique needs of their invoice structure and blended projects they had a challenge creating timely invoices. Also had difficulty determining project profitability and the owner was spending time trying to determine profitability instead of growing his business.
- Additional Focus area : Long term client of over 9 years
The Challenge / Pain Point
- What financial or operational issue they had before outsourcing
- Outgrew their WB systems.
- Unique billing requirements for fixed fee and time and material projects
- Lack of visibility into their project and company profitability
- How it was affecting their business (time, accuracy, stress, cash flow, etc.)
- Owner spent to much time trying to track project profitability and could not focus on growth since was a 5 person firm at the time (2016)
- Cash flow was effected due to delays in invoicing
- QB was breaking
Why They Chose Us
- What stood out about our service vs. doing it themselves or hiring in-house
- As a small firm they did not have the expertise in doing the work inhouse and it would take multiple people to manage both the new system infrastructure and perform the accounting
- Specific strength (expertise, technology, responsiveness, cost efficiency)
- Our team understood his business needs and walked in with a plan to meet those needs on day 1
- We provided both system and financial expertise
- We brought a standard design that streamlined his time tracking, billing and project profitability
- Our team managed both his books and his system freeing up the owner to focus on growing his business via new projects
- Our team provided him business and project financials timely via dashboards so he could understand where he was on each project and in his business in real-time
- Cut bookkeeping time by 75%
- Reduced accounting costs by 40%
- Gained accurate monthly reporting for the first time
Key Results / Outcomes
- Accuracy improved – Enabled project profitability which did not exist
- Time saved – Cut billing time by 80% getting bills out timely improving cashflow
- Cost savings – 47% cost discount in having out team managed both his financial and technology infrastructure himself due to economies of scall on technology, technology efficiencies and fractional system and accounting teams which all worked under one standard design
- Better financial decisions – Provided accurate project financial position that he never had to better understand his business
- Scaled team / grew revenue – Was able to grow revenue over 300%
- Peace of mind – Burden of managing the technology or financial part of his business was eliminated and was provided for over 9 years until his successful exit (acquisition in 2025)