One back office for six trades companies

A group of six plumbing, heating, electrical, and lighting companies in the Chicago suburbs now runs on one operations portal. It went into production on October 21.

The problem

Each company grew up on its own, with its own systems and its own books: eight separate QuickBooks files across the group. There was no single place to see how the whole group was doing.

What we built

• One portal for the whole group, hosted on Google Cloud with two-factor sign-in.
• Live field service data.Jobs and invoices sync in from the companies’ field software, starting with three of the companies.
• All eight QuickBooks files loaded, with a daily read-only sync. The portal never writes to the books.
• A Monday summary email to the owner with the numbers across every company.
• Online card payments for customers, tested with the first company.

Next: estimating

For the group’s electrical company we built estimating into the same portal: their catalog and quote math, proposals in their own layout, past quotes imported as history, site walks captured on a phone, and AI that drafts the quote from walk notes for the estimator to check. It went to their estimator for testing on November 2. We will write it up when it’s in daily use, with real numbers.

Where it is now

The portal is live. New websites for each company are built and will move over to their domains one at a time.