Chandos construction's customer story
How Chandos Streamlined Subcontractor Management with GCPay
Chandos is one of Canada’s most innovative and collaborative builders. They’re also the first and largest B Corp certified commercial builder in North America. Chandos has been shaking up the Canadian construction industry since 1980 and shows no signs of backing down. They specialize in sustainable development, construction management, and Building Information Modeling.
Chandos has been a GCPay user since 2018. We recently sat down with Sean MacDonell, Accounting Manager, and Dylan Bergeron, Senior Accountant, to discuss their trade processing and subcontractor management with the GCPay platform.
Sean MacDonell
Accounting Manager
Company Info
Founded in 1980
Headquarted in Edmonton, AB
The Challenge
Before getting started with GCPay, the Chandos team managed their subcontractors via Excel files and their accounting system, Viewpoint Vista. Unfortunately, as Dylan pointed out, the system of linking Excel documents and subcontracts in Vista was not standard across the board, making it difficult to keep track of everything.
Sean commented that the back and forth with Excel was tedious and involved an immense amount of communication with the trades so change orders were updated properly. Seans says their old process was really only 50% of the way there for what we were looking for. Beyond process, the Chandos team had trouble with document control. The trades are required to submit certain documentation along with their progress claim, but they often wouldn’t include it, meaning there had to be more back and forth communication.
Sean points out that the team wasted an hour a day sending rejection emails and chasing missing documents.
can be confident you will be successful.”
GCPay + Viewpoint Vista
GCPay and Viewpoint have been integration partners since 2012. This partnership allows for information within Vista relating to subcontracts, change orders, and compliance to sync automatically with GCPay. The integration ensures subcontractor invoices and change orders are detailed properly and processed accordingly, plus eliminates the need to enter contract and invoice data twice.
Decision Making
The Chandos team knew they were spending way too much time and effort in Excel and their inboxes. Sean estimates that project accountants spent 60% of their time processing trades rather than working on other, more important initiatives. The team knew they needed a tool that could bridge the gap between the general contractor and the subcontractor on each project and add some consistency to the process.
Dylan tells us that GCPay was the perfect tool to act as the “middleman” to check contracts and progress claims on both the contractor and the subcontractor side. More than anything, they needed something that would save them time and work directly with Vista. The Chandos team was excited to get onboarded with GCPay and were impressed with the level of customer service and training offered to implement the platform successfully.
Sean continues, “The customer service with GCPay is at such a level that you can be confident you will be successful.”
Solutions & Results
Using GCPay has improved Chandos’ relationships with their subcontractor trades as there is less back and forth over differing contract amounts or missing documentation. GCPay offers transparency on both ends, so it’s easy to see discrepancies and get them fixed right away.
There is less manual data entry, which means fewer errors that need to be processed. Dylan is happy to see that the accounting team has more time for value-add activities rather than administrative tasks.
The integration with Viewpoint Vista is incredibly important for Chandos. The accounting team and project managers used to take hours determining if discrepancies were math errors or disagreements and figuring out how to proceed.
With the Vista integration, data from GCPay is imported and updated in Vista with the click of a button, quickly eradicating errors. It’s way faster and more secure than their old process. As more projects are brought into the platform, more Chandos team members appreciate the GCPay functionality.
“It’s an easy sell once the project managers see how it works,” Sean tells us. “Everyone who has dealt with it so far wants to keep using it on their projects.”
