191. Mastering Cashflow With Adam Eagle

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder's Secrets. In this episode, I interview Adam Eagle from Beam Payment Software. Beam is on a mission to help residential builders take control of their finances by automating one of the most frustrating parts of the job, managing subcontractor invoices and payments. So instead of chasing paperwork, Beam helps you streamline job costing and reduce the stress related to all of these moving parts in your building company. Keep listening to discover how automating your financial management cost could be the key to improving and scaling your building company. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope, end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

Our software does a lot more than just the expense management and invoicing and things like that. It starts all the way with deal tracking and estimating, sending your proposals through a digital system that tracks email opens, it tracks opening up the proposal page online. You end up closing more deals because it looks more professional. You can see engagement with your emails. So it really all starts at sales. Now, some folks aren't closing deals. They're not selling. They're doing spec. In which case it's mostly around two things. Saving time. I shouldn't have to spend so much time running this accounts payable process or producing an invoice. And then two, reducing cost overruns, making each project more profitable.

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by Adam Eagle from Beam. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Really excited to have you on today. Adam, do you want to give the listeners a bit of a background on who you are and what Beam does as well?

Yeah. Thanks Will. So my name is Adam Eagle. I am the CEO and founder of Beam. We are a software company based in California and we help builders manage all of their project finances and everything that surrounds that process. I spent about six years building payments and billing software at a company called Stripe, one of the largest payment processors in the world. Now does over $1 trillion of payment processing. I was primarily helping other tech companies and I really started to get the itch to go and help small and midsize businesses that were doing something that I was a lot more passionate about. For me, that was building houses, building infrastructure, something that I think is sorely needed. And so I started interviewing as many builders as I could get my hands on. I was texting friends, saying, hey, have you had your house remodeled? Did you buy a house from a builder? Getting introductions to builders around the Bay Area, around the country. And then I discovered that there was a real problem here. I said, well, I think I could probably build a product to help, assuming I can all, you know, talk to builders every single day and learn about what their problems are.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question. If you're not from the industry traditionally, if you worked in payments, how did you get to understand the intricacies of construction projects and the payments that relate to that?

There's this saying. I think it's like, explain. Explain it. Like, I'm five, and I would kind of just play a very naive approach of, okay, you know, explain to me how you're tracking all of your subcontractor payments. Tell me, like, how do you make sure you're making money on this project? Because I was coming in with this naivety, people would explain it to me, and a lot of times they would end up saying, you know what? I guess I don't know this as well as I should. And then we would discover these interesting challenges. But immediately, the truth is, like, immediately after I started interviewing these folks, they would open up pretty quickly about what felt way too complicated, right? Like, hey, why am I still dealing with these paper checks? Why is it taking me three hours a week to run this process? And so, yeah, we've never found a shortage of problems in the industry. We're not like some technology seeking a problem. We just listen to our customers and they tell us, you know, what challenges they're facing, and then we try to build good software for it.

What were some of those challenges you uncovered when it comes to financial management for the builders you were talking to?

The number one thing that we've seen is that a builder might have seven or eight different systems in place that all touch their finances. So, you know, just rattling off some. At the very bottom, they have QuickBooks for their accounting or Xero or another company. Everything needs to end up in that system. But then they have an email, and that email is receiving all of these invoices from subcontractors. They have mailbox. They might be getting mail from a supplier or something like that. They have a credit card which has all these transactions. On it. They probably have someone knocking on their door, a subcontractor showing up to the door asking for a paper check. They're creating all these paper checks. You know, their project manager probably has a spreadsheet to track the project budget. The estimator has a spreadsheet to create the original estimate for the project. None of these systems actually talk to each other, right? What we often found was you had seven or eight different processes and none of them ended up going into a single place where you could say, how much have I spent this week? You know, what is my estimate versus actuals? When I entered this space, very naively, I thought, okay, well everyone must be doing job costing, right? Because that's what you read online. And it turns out, you know, 90 something percent of builders are not consistently doing job costing. And it's not because builders aren't smart enough or they don't care. It's, it's way too much work to do. I think those are the two big areas. The just that organization of, of the data, not having it co located in one place and then the workflows involved with just doing a simple task like paying a subcontractor, sending an invoice ends up being way too complicated.

Honestly, I'm not a financial person either, and that just sounds a bit overwhelming. Like if you're a builder that's come from a background of loving your craft, building homes and doing amazing work from that perspective, dealing with all that sounds like a real headache. Is that what you've noticed as well?

Yeah. If you have three tasks you want to get done today, Number one, you're going to go to a job site and you're going to make sure that something was installed correctly. Number two, you're going to call up a subcontractor and negotiate a subcontract with them and, you know, scope and, and everything. And number three, you're going to go clean up QuickBooks. I, I promise you, you're not going to do number three first, that I don't have a single builder that I've talked to who's excited to go into QuickBooks and, you know, manage their finances. And look, I, I'm the same way too. I dread having to, you know, categorize all my expenses at the end of the week. For beam. It's even harder for a builder because to be honest, a builder's finances are way more complicated than my finances. For Beam, every single project we work with a lot of custom home builders that are doing beautiful homes and a lot of These projects will have hundreds of vendor bills, hundreds of card transactions, tons of change orders or, you know, budget adjustments. And so you end up with this giant list of budget items. There's all these changes to them over time. There's hundreds of debits or, and credits when there are refunds and all these things. And trying to track that by hand is just absolutely awful. That's how we came to our solution is we really wanted to co locate all of everything that touches your bank account into a single system so that you didn't have to go and manually enter data from your credit card into your job costing spreadsheet or print out a paper check for a subcontractor payment that you, that's been approved. I can keep providing examples, but you know, it's, it's, I'm sure all the builders that are listening and thinking about their last big project and you know, how many vendor bills there were and how many expenses there were, they get it.

Yeah. I mean, outside of the chaos, which is obviously probably stressful and overwhelming at times when it comes to all those different moving parts, it's actually the hidden problem that I think is even more concerning.

Right.

Like if you don't fully understand all of the financial movements and payment movements in your building company, which a lot of builders unfortunately don't, you're most likely running an unprofitable company or multiple unprofitable projects, and that can kind of explode at some point.

Yeah. Well, you want to hear like the number one objection that we get when we talk to a builder and we tell them about what we built is they say, oh, I have a bookkeeper that does that. The truth is like the bookkeeper is making sure that QuickBooks gets populated with something. But can you see your, your job costs in real time? Do you know at the end of every week, are you running over or under on a particular part of the job? Probably not. Some builders have got it down. Right. A very small percentage have got it down. And that's, that's amazing. But most haven't. And you'd rather kind of ignore the problem and just hope that the project is profitable in some cases. So what, what we're trying to do is we're trying to educate builders on what it can look like when you're properly job costing. We have a builder down in South Florida, he builds spec homes and so he has a very clear budget from the bank and he has to submit every single bill, every single expense, and he has to have a lien waiver for every Single bill. So he's able to do that in beam. And he told us, you know, prior to beam, that whole process was taking about, I think he said, 10 hours a week of his time, plus a bookkeeper's time for just, you know, a single project. Now, these are big projects, multimillion dollar homes, but, but still. And he's only doing that because he has to. Most builders, especially if you're not doing spec homes, you're not required to track every single expense and bill and submit that to a bank. You might just be invoicing the client. And so what we've seen is if you're not required, you're probably not doing it because it historically took 10 hours a week or something like that. And now you don't actually know, you know, whether or not you're making money or losing money. But anyway, the long story short is once he started using beam, all of his bills were submitted to him in the system. All of his expenses are automatically tracked. He swipes a card, he gets a push notification, he tags it to a project, he tags it to an accounting code. So everything gets in the system. Every payment, you know, there's an E signature with a subcontractor to collect the lien waiver. And then he just creates a draw through the system. It takes all of that, puts it into a single document, he can send it to his bank. So now it's taking him about 30 minutes instead of 10 hours. Really cool story. You know, he told us that now he can wake up in the morning and go for a morning swim. Whereas he used to stress out every single. Every single morning, hey, do I, do I have all the numbers, etcetera? Keep in mind, this is only, it's only happening because he has to do it. A lot of builders, they don't have to. And so like you said, well, they kind of just say, oh, yeah, my bookkeeper handles it. And in reality, they don't really know how much money they're making.

Yeah, the other concern with relying on a bookkeeper, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great bookkeepers out there, but many of them are generalists. They don't fully understand the complexities of the construction industry and all of the different moving parts that you mentioned. And if you just rely on them, you're kind of. You're putting yourself in a really tricky situation. It's like any, like, if you outsource your marketing, for example, to a marketing agency, you're just relying on them to generate leads and that could get to a point where you go, hold on, I haven't got anything out of this. You really need to understand what's happening and know where all the numbers are from a financial perspective so you can hold a bookkeeper accountable. Right?

You're exactly right. I have a bookkeeper too for Beam, and I would never run the business without a bookkeeper. But I need to do things on top of that because my bookkeeper isn't going to tell me how to track my software revenue as a software business and how to track ARR properly and how to see, you know, churn rates or whatever. And so I have built, you know, the team around me has built a bunch of dashboards and systems on top of that. So same thing as a builder, your bookkeeper is going to help you reconcile the books and get ready for tax season. Not every external bookkeeper is going to be able to help you with the job costing. Now, there are a lot of great bookkeepers we partner with quite a few of them that are great at doing job costing. You generally have to pay more for that. But what we've seen is that most builders aren't doing that. Their bookkeepers are doing sort of the minimum that's required to keep the business going, to do the taxes at the end of the year, which I totally get because it's a crazy amount of work to do anything more than that.

Yeah. I think you touched on the fact that a lot of builders don't fully understand, like, the state of their finances at any point in time. And we highly recommend builders do regular work in progress accounting adjustments so they understand how much money they actually or how much profit they actually have in the business. In construction, there's so much cash flow at any one time, you could be outlaying a lot and you think you've got more money than you than you do. Alarmingly, when we did our annual research, the State of Residential Construction Industry Survey, and report, only 11.4% of builders across Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, two and a half thousand builders almost participated. Only 11.4% understood how to calculate the work in progress, accounting adjustment. And that kind of just highlights the issue, right?

Yeah. And I do want to also say, you know, figuring out where you're at on a project is one part of the problem. The other part of the problem that we should talk about too is just the sheer amount of paper pushing that is involved with getting a simple task done. Like, let's walk through an example. I'll walk through kind of a. Before and after with one of our builders. So let's say high end remodeler. They're working with clients in the Bay Area. They have to pay subcontractors. Of course, they subcontract out most of their work. Now, what does it take to pay a subcontractor in a sort of analog paper pushing system? You get an email or you get something in the mail with an invoice. That invoice is generally not formatted against the original subcontract you signed. So now you got to create a spreadsheet. And that spreadsheet needs to track how much have I paid that subcontractor, how much do they have left? But there's also change orders. You know, are there any change orders for the subcontractor? So you might have a separate Dropbox folder of all your subcontractor change orders and, and the original contract. And you need to go and update your, your spreadsheet. Somebody goes and checks to make sure that that amount matches, you know, what's been done. Someone needs to go verify the work was completed. Then a project manager or the owner needs to code it, right? What is this? Is this for framing? Is this for plumbing? Then it needs to go and get entered into QuickBooks or some other system for accounting. Then it needs to get approved by the owner or whoever is making sort of cash flow decisions. Should we pay this now, should we pay this in a week? Then a paper check needed to get printed, and that paper check needed to be delivered to a subcontractor, either mailed, handed to them, brought to a job site, something like that. And then finally, about a week or two later, you'd see in your bank feed that there was a check that was deposited for $10,000 and you'd have to go and reconcile it in the system. And so imagine you have 20 or 30 or 40 of these that you're doing every single week. And that process times 20, 30, 40 is an absolute nightmare. When it's easy, it's easy. The problem is it gets hard sometimes and there's multiple change orders and there's a dispute or you need to collect a lien waiver. And so what we found is just the process of paying a subcontractor could be a huge time sink for your team, you know, your bookkeeper, your office manager, your project manager. And you as the business owner, you get sucked away from the real work to do all this paper pushing.

Yeah, it sounds like the risk of errors in that is significantly high as well. And also as Well, I mean, you might, you know, not pay a subcontractor on time or something because of the complexity there. And you want to keep your subcontractors.

Happy if they're good. That's a great point. And here in California we have a massive labor shortage, you know, skilled labor shortage. To find a good H vac or plumber, electric electrician is just, it's a nightmare. Right. Someone who wants to work on larger scale construction jobs can show up on time. Right. It's hard. And so once you find a good one, you want to keep them happy. So the most successful general contractors that we've worked with, they have an extremely fast payment cycle. It's, you know, send the invoice, we'll approve it, we'll schedule a payment for later this week or immediately and it'll get deposited into your bank account one day later, two days later, something like that. And that encourages those subcontractors to come back to you and bid on your projects, bid lower, by the way, because they know that they're going to get paid faster. That's kind of a dirty secret of the industry that I. Or a hidden secret of the industry that I didn't realize was that subcontractors will bid on projects depending on the general contractor's reputation. You know, how easy are they to work with, how quickly will you get paid, how much will they pay you upfront, things like that. And so, you know, when you're thinking about the overall cost of construction, you have to keep that in mind. A general contractor who has great cash flow is probably going to have a competitive advantage from a pricing perspective than one that doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great business practice in any industry. We have a policy at APB around paying invoices almost immediately as they come in to maintain those relationships and get the best out of the people you're working with.

It depends on your industry, of course, because as a builder, your cash flow situation, that's true. Is, is a lot tougher. Right. What's the saying? You know, hand to mouth and.

Yeah, you know, what are you paying a subcontractor before you've got cash in the bank.

Exactly. So, so that's another thing too is how do you, how do you know you have enough cash in the bank? How do you monitor that if you're just printing out paper checks? Your paper checks don't tell you how much money you have left in your bank account. Right. So anyways, that entire process that I went through with like 12 steps that all happen in different systems. You can simplify that. And so we helped this Bay Area contractor and many others simplify that process. Get rid of a bunch of unnecessary steps, move them from analog to digital, get his subcontractors to send him invoices that were automatically coded against his subcontract. So moving to more of a PO based system. And then all of a sudden, you know, that process of paying a subcontractor takes minutes instead of hours. And his subcontractors are happy too, because they get paid faster. They get notifications. They're not waiting for a check in the mail, or they're not waiting for a check to be handed them to them on a job site. They get emails that tell them in real time what's happening.

Kind of blows my mind that people are still invoicing by mail, though. I think you mentioned that earlier.

Yeah, yeah, especially bigger, bigger companies tend to do that. But also some smaller businesses that are just a little, little more old school. Maybe the bookkeepers, the accounts receivable team is nearing retirement age, right? They'll. They still have a process of, of mailing out invoices. Sometimes they do both. They'll mail them and they'll email them, which is kind of funny. But we've seen it all, right? We've processed at this point, I don't even know how many tens of thousands of bill payments, if not more. We see scanned, you know, we see crumpled up pieces of paper, handwritten that are uncrumpled. They snap a photo and they put it in the system. Right? We've seen, we've truly seen it all. And so going from a bunch of crumpled up pieces of paper to an online system that you can access at any time, it properly tracks everything you can see, you know, how much was paid, how much was unpaid. It just makes their lives so much easier.

We'll dive into more about beam in a second, but I have a question related to what you just said then, with the crumpled up paper and the physical invoices and receipts and things like that, is your software automatically picking up the details on those so that they're getting added to the system without people needing to do manual work?

Some of it, yes. But the reality is I actually studied machine learning back in my college days. My first job out of college was working on machine learning. My second job out of college was working on machine learning. So I love this stuff. But the reality is like, the accuracy is not quite there yet. You still need to manually review everything. So we have a bill scanning feature. You can put your bill in there. We'll scan as many details as possible. We'll match it up to your accounting codes and your vendors and existing projects in the system. We require that you manually review every single thing that we put in there to make sure it's correct. You should not be paying a vendor $10,000 based off of an AI system. You need to manually review that. It's just, it's worth, it's worth the time. Right. So what we do is we encourage folks to, you know, upload bills into the system or expenses. We will read as much as we can off of the file. We'll pre fill that form for you, and then you go in and you review everything. And there are some cases where we can, we're more confident and so we'll show you that we're confident. And there's other cases where we know that there's a mistake. Right. The totals aren't adding up. And so we'll tell. You have a big yellow bar saying something is missing here. Please go find it. Anyone who promises to you that AI is going to totally automate your job, they probably haven't used any of these AI tools or they're just lying to you. They're not quite there yet, but they are really helpful. I constantly am surprised by how much they can help me and assist me in my job. They're not quite ready to replace me though.

Yeah, I mean, even that's a huge time saver though, rather than me taking something and manually entering it into a system. You know, if it's, if it's at a review point and you just need to tweak a couple of things or just click a button, that's going to save you a lot of time as well.

Yeah, totally.

Okay, take a quick step back. If builders do put better systems in place, adopt software, all this kind of stuff you've, you've been hinting at to try to solve this problem of just complexity. With so many different payments and cash going everywhere in their company, plus the time it takes to do all of that, what benefits do they see?

There are quite a few. So you know, our software does a lot more than just the expense management and invoicing and things like that. It starts all the way with deal tracking and estimating and so on that side, what we're seeing is sending your proposals through a digital system that tracks email opens, it tracks opening up the proposal page online. You end up closing more deals because it looks more professional. You can see engagement with, with your emails and things like that. So it really all starts at sales, and closing more deals is number one. Now, some folks aren't closing deals. They're not selling. They're. They're doing spec, or that's not a problem for them, in which case it's mostly around two things. Saving time, right? I shouldn't have to spend so much time running this accounts payable process or producing an invoice, and then two, reducing cost overruns, making each project more profitable. So if I can track my card expenses across my team in real time, hopefully I'm going to catch some errors. I have a crazy personal story that happened about four months ago. We had to redo our roof after a big storm in San Francisco. We realized that the siding actually was part of the problem. Our roofing contractor had to replace the siding. He got a quote. He produced a change order. I can't remember what the change order was for, but it's something like $18,000. And it was based off of the materials cost being about 13,000. He placed an order with a lumberyard to get the siding material. One of his workers went to pick up the material, but actually picked up a totally different order. And it happened to be a different order of siding. Instead of being $13,000, it was something like $21,000. Now he installed it is actually fine, right? It's doing its job. Our roof is now waterproof. He actually lost money on that change order. So he spent more on materials than the entire change order. He didn't find out about that problem till about a week or two later when he finally looked at his credit card statement and said, wait a second. Why is that $21,000 instead of 13,000? And it was just a simple miscommunication, a simple error that could have been caught in real time before they installed the siding. They could have realized, oh, we picked up the wrong siding. Let's go and return it. Let's get the new one. And we hear stories like that. You know, that's just my personal story, but we hear stories like that all the time. Getting double charged, purchasing the wrong materials, whatever it may be. And then same thing with. With vendor payments, right? I think our very first customer told me that he realized once he switched to beam that he was occasionally double paying a subcontractor. You know, he'd pay the same invoice twice and wouldn't even realize that. There's just a lot of ways that you can reduce those. Those cost overruns and. And make more money. So it's really about like getting rid of the headaches, spend less time on the most tedious tasks to reduce cost overruns. And then three, if, if sales is, you know, a bottleneck for, for you, close more deals. Press customers with, with our proposal system, get E signatures directly through the system. You know, send contracts through the system, save a lot of time, and then end up with just more projects to fill up your calendar. Yeah.

Double payments is actually more common than people would think in business. And it's not usually a cynical thing from the, the invoicee. Invoicer. I don't know if I've got that right or if it's even a word.

Yeah, yeah, we, we always say payer and payee. Yeah, that probably makes more sense. Yeah, the, yeah, the payee is sending that invoice and they might just be sending a reminder. Exactly. But then someone else at the company might be like, oh, I need to pay this. And they end up processing the same invoice twice. Yeah, it happens too often. And yeah, you know, if you're doing a payment over paper check, unfortunately paper checks are not smart enough to realize. Wait a second, you've paid this vendor the same amount twice? Are you sure? Sure this is correct. But any software can do that.

You've spoken a fair bit about the end to end from beam, but I kind of want to dive into that a little bit more just to give a really holistic overview of what it is you guys do. One big question on my mind is how does it fit into the ecosystem of other construction software? Because most builders out there. Well, maybe not. There's probably still a lot using spreadsheets for estimating and all this kind of stuff, which is not ideal. But most that are using software, they'll probably have an estimating software or project management software.

Yeah.

So how do you guys fit into that ecosystem?

Yeah, so it's interesting, some builders, they don't want the full project management software. They don't. They might be putting their schedules into, into Smartsheet or, or Microsoft projects and they don't want the full project management system. They're really just looking for certain parts to be solved for them. For us, we see ourselves as like a light project management software, but really, really heavy on the financials. And so you can send client updates through our system. You, you know, you get a client portal for, for each project. You can produce, change orders. So a lot of the things that we, that we think about when it comes to project management, you can do in beam. What we don't do. We're not going to help you produce a schedule. We're not going to help you, you know, with selections and things like that. So there are certain areas that are, that are just sort of out of scope for us right now. But everything that touches dollars and cents, that's fair game for us. And we think that the focus allows us to build a better product. For example, our system, it comes with a bank account that earns 2.5% APY. Compare that to most checking accounts at 0.01%. We have a payment processing solution. Our payments are processed in, you know, one to two business days. Some of our payments same business day. Whereas most invoicing systems and most bill pay systems, it's you know, five business days or, or, or longer. And those things really matter, those that really adds up. Because when you're trying to pay your subcontractor, if it's Thursday and you tell them, hey, I'm going to schedule a payment today, if it's going to land on Friday, that's very different from it landing, you know, next Thursday or next Wednesday. We also issue that the credit card and it's a true corporate card for your business. It's not under your personal, you don't have personal liability. It's a true corporate card. You can issue one to every single teammate who's responsible for making purchases. And all of that's within the same ecosystem. So accepting payments from clients, paying subcontractors, expense management with a credit card, storing funds in the beam balance. If you're already doing all that, you might as well store it in beam. It's faster and you make more money. And that's. Those are the kinds of features that the project management systems tend to not build out because it is more complicated. Right. We, our team comes from a financial technologies background and these things are really hard to get right. You know, the banking system here in the US is really complicated. Well, I know you're in, in Australia where things just work a little bit better, but in the US the banking system, it's complicated, doesn't always work perfectly. So we're doing a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that the one to two business day payment actually goes through properly. If there's an error like the client actually put in the wrong bank account, that gets resolved very quickly as well. And we think that that's really important to builders. For many builders, getting all of that right is more important than having a system that unifies your job schedule and you know, your client communication.

So you're Actually holding money for Builders, or they've got an account with you guys and you're holding money, how. What protocols do you need to undergo to make sure that you're as secure and safe as a big bank, for example?

Yeah, so we go through a lot of them. We have. We have security experts try to penetrate our systems. We pay them to try to penetrate our systems. They produce reports. We have a lot of security in place to update or change bank accounts. Everything is audited. So, like, who did what in the system, who are they logged in, who is logged in, who initiated a transfer, and most importantly, every transaction is reversible. You know, this is kind of a scary thing to think about, but if you receive a payment from someone or you try to send someone a payment that uses something called ACH in the U.S. aCH is. It takes a couple of days to process, as we all know, but it is reversible. And so when there's fraud or when there's some sort of issue, we can go to the bank and submit evidence and do a reversal. That means that it's hard to get scammed out of money. I can. I'll knock on wood real quick and say we've never lost money for one of our customers. Really proud to say that. And we've never had any security incident. And we continue to invest in making sure the system is secure. The other thing to mention is that bank account is FDIC insured up to $250,000. So it's a standard US bank account. It's not some weird crypto thing or anything like that. It's a real US bank account that is protected by the US Government.

Makes sense. And what about accounting software? Do you guys replace QuickBooks or are you just tying into something like that?

Yeah, I'd say about 80 or 90% of our customers will integrate us with QuickBooks online. And then a small percentage will say, you know what, I'm not Even really using QuickBooks online anymore. I'm just going to rip it out and say goodbye. And they're just using Beam. It's based off of your accountant's preference. Some accountants say, I really want you to have a QuickBooks instance because I know how to run all the reports from there. Other accountants say, you know what, everything in Beam is fine. I'll do your taxes at the end of the year with Beam, plus your bank statement statements. And it really just depends on the builder and who their accountant is. So we generally recommend, unless your accountant has specifically told you, yeah, you can get rid of QuickBooks, I'm not going to use it. Just keep something like QuickBooks around or whatever accounting system you're using.

Awesome. Did you have any final advice for the builders listening in today, Adam, in terms of just improving their financial management processes?

Yeah, I mean, the same way that you think about your project schedule and the same way that you're constantly thinking about, hey, are we getting onto the next phase properly? Did I call the subcontractor to notify them? You should be thinking the same way about your budget. You should have that clear view of what your budget looks like. You should have systems in place to make it really easy to control that and track all of your expenses and produce change orders and produce invoices and process bill payments and all of that. It makes your life so much easier. And like I said, you know, you want a system that can handle it all end to end. You don't want a system that just relies on manual data entry, doesn't really sync with your QuickBooks, doesn't really do payment processing. It just creates more work if you have to type in more data. So look for a system that handles it. All right, can do all the payment processing, can connect to your accounting software, can bring in information from your email or from PDFs, things like that, because that's going to be what makes job costing take minutes instead of hours.

For anyone listening that wants to find out more about Beam, TryBeam.com is your guys website and also for any members of the association of Professional Builders, Beam are a rewards partner as well. So you can get a cash rebate for working with Adam and his team. But Adam, thanks for coming on Professional Builders Secrets today. It's been a fun chat. I've actually really enjoyed it even though at the start, before we jumped on, I said I'm not sure if I'm going to enjoy financial management chat, but it was super interesting. So thank you.

No money. Money is something that we can all agree is an important thing. And I know it's kind of an abstract thing, these project budgets, but at the end of the day it might mean the difference between you making $100,000 at the end of the year and you making 200 or more. It's really important to get this stuff right. And I know the, the, the inner details are boring. The spreadsheets and the ACH and all of these other acronyms. But once you master this stuff, it allows your business to grow and allows your profitability to grow substantially.

Yeah, it's scary to dive into all of the numbers, but it's even scarier if you don't know them.

Yes. 100%.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Adam.

Thank you.

And a big thank you to our listeners as well, wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.