Sep 12, 2024

Screenshot courtesy of Superior Masonry Unlimited September 12, 2024 When Matt Andersen ended 20 years in public accounting and joined then-client Superior Masonry Unlimited as CFO in 2022, his first order of business was to modernize the specialty contractor’s accounting systems. That effort would bring both to use cloud-based Sage Intacct combined with Stampli, an artificial intelligence accounts payable processor, “We had an accounting system that was hosted on premises, on a server,” Andersen says. Like many specialty contractors, the Fort Mill, S.C., firm’s on-premise software had no application program interface (API) connection and field management software was out of the question. Andersen considered a software corruption issue in 2022 as a perfect opportunity to upgrade that system. “Let’s look at technology out there, and let’s build something that will help us become the company that we want to be,” he says. Andersen wanted accounting software with an open API that would allow Superior to unite its estimating and preconstruction departments with project management so bids and estimates could flow between both. Also common to specialty firms, paper invoices were piling up at Superior. “A big pain point with this company, and I know with others, is processing of accounts payable,” he says. “It was a heavy paper burden.” Accounts payable automation plugged into an API that was connected to Superior’s accounting and construction management platform was “easy fruit to pick,” says Andersen. Rethinking the Process Procore was Superior’s construction management platform that its accounting team used, along with cloud-based Sage Intacct, to provide field employees access to purchase orders, plans and communication tools. But they still needed a tool to enable accounts payable to automate many paper invoices, Andersen explains. “We started evaluating the AP automation platforms and, after probably about three months of research, we stumbled onto Stampli,” he says, noting discussions with that firm’s experts “about how they’re leveraging AI to help speed up the process.” Andersen says Stampli was on the verge of using AI to run Superior’s entire accounts payable process, matching invoices to purchase orders. “It was a no brainer for us,” he says, noting that a task that used to be “about a 40-hour week’s worth of effort” now is reduced to about four hours using the Stampli AI. Stampli software digitally captures invoice data by using optical character recognition and a large language model that enable customers like Superior to include project data such as invoice and purchase order numbers—allowing AI to automatically match them. Andersen says Superior no longer looks at its accounts payable system as separate from its construction management or accounting systems. Connecting more systems is the firm’s future, he explains. “We are building the company, not as we are today, but as the one that we will be in the future,” he says. “We’re probably ahead of where we need to be, but that’s the mindset that we have—let’s fix problems before they are problems.” Using cloud-based Sage Intacct gives Superior flexibility so its project managers can call up information and see corresponding submittals and change orders in Procore’s platform. The specialty contractor has all the tools it needs in the field to be able to function from smartphones. The next step is tieing in a customer relationship management system, Andersen says. “The last step that we are starting to take on now is looking at our preconstruction processes,” he explains. “How are we going to do our takeoffs and estimates, and how do we get that to integrate into Procore, because [it] is the hub for us that feeds all the information back to Intacct?” Andersen says the goal is having “one source of truth within that system that will give us the data that we need.”