Riley Construction's Customer Story
Automating Subcontractor Payments with GCPay at Riley Construction
Riley Construction, a commercial general contractor headquartered in Kenosha, Wisconsin, serves clients ranging from hospital systems and pharmaceutical companies to industrial buildings and schools.
Riley is a GC/CM that performs a lot of its own trade work, including carpentry, concrete, drywall, and masonry in house, but still works with many subcontractors to complete each project.
We sat down with Vince Montemurro, Riley’s CFO, to talk about how GCPay has significantly improved their subcontractor payment process and saved them hours of work every month.
Vince Montemurro
Chief Financial Officer
Company Info
Founded in 1965
Headquarted in Kenosha, WI
Saving > Scrambling
Before GCPay, when Riley’s accounting team prepared the monthly billing cycle, they’d reach out to subcontractors for paper invoices. Mostly, the paperwork wouldn’t arrive on schedule. When it did, it usually needed revised because of mathematical errors, insufficient detail, or stat dec issues. Then, Riley’s accountants would scramble to get everything in and approved by the project management team.
Vince explains, “It was controlled chaos to get everything organized and get all of the information consolidated, put on our own application and submitted to our owners, and them oftentimes there would still be a lot of revisions. It could get difficult for everyone.”
Invoices would get lost in the shuffle, meaning subcontractors wouldn’t get on Riley’s application, miss the draw, and not get paid. Subcontractors became frustrated, relationships were damaged, and some didn’t want to take on future work.
“All that frustration just boils over, and it really did become a problem that we had to solve,” Vince says.
Riley searched for a solution to solve their waiver issues or their subcontractors’ submittal of invoices issues. Vince continues “Fortunately, GCPay solves both of those issues for us. It’s made it so much easier for us to knock out all of the problems around subcontractors getting their payment applications correct and eliminating accuracy errors.”
And, GCPay has helped Riley Construction’s subcontractors by automating everything for them.
GCPay + Viewpoint Vista
GCPay has been an integration partner with Viewpoint’s Vista product since 2012.
This partnership allows subcontract, change order, and compliance data in Vista to sync automatically with GCPay every 30 minutes.
Payment applications that are approved in GCPay can be exported directly into Vista as AIA invoices with Vista’s import module.
This ERP integration ensures subcontractor invoices and change orders are detailed properly and processed accordingly.
GCPay is the leading subcontract management platform for automating invoicing, compliance and lien waiver management functions. GCPay is compatible with any computer, tablet or mobile device, allowing both office and field employees to increase efficiency while reducing costs in the management of their subcontracts.
Universal Benefits
The biggest challenge GCPay solved = lien waivers.
There’s major value in the notifications GCPay sends to subcontractors letting them know when their applications need to be submitted. Riley doesn’t have to hassle subcontractors for waivers.
Vince explains, “Waivers are probably the nicest universal benefit. The contract/payment values and project specific details are automated on the waiver, reducing mistakes that previously would have resulted in revision requests, which would slow down the client application submittal process, and ultimately, the payment process to the subcontractor too. Because GCPay will not allow our subs to submit a bill without a completed waiver, my team is able to be more proactive about collecting and organizing all waivers for our clients, rather than reacting after we were paid.”
Customer service sealed the deal
Vince was so impressed with the easy-to-follow presentations and service that Riley Construction received during the discovery phase, that he realized GCPay was something that they had to entertain.
He continues, “When we started to implement GCPay, the GCPay team was readily accessible and available to answer our questions in real time and the relationship kind of built on that. We decided we were going to use GCPay for any large project we worked on, and we were happy to pay for it because we knew all of the benefits that it provided on a job-by-job basis.” And Vince’s team feels completely comfortable with contacting the phone support line. “On day-to-day maintenance things, the support group has been awesome and very responsive”.
Riley’s subcontractors benefit, too
Riley Construction’s subcontractors are using GCPay too, and they are getting the benefits. Subs like GCPay because they receive notifications and know that their pay applications are approved. Plus, they can count on a reasonable timeframe until payment.
Subcontractors also love that GCPay is like an internal control for them. They can see that what they tried to bill matches what’s in their system on the AR side.
“It keeps their figures aligned with how it’s been posted in the system,” Vince says. “We get responses from subcontractors who find it really easy to use saying they just jump on, punch in their numbers and they are good to go. You know, they really like that.”
No Wasted Time on Invoices and Waivers
GCPay saves Riley Construction about 80 hours a month on invoice entry and waivers, and even more time on the vast reduction in phone calls from subcontractors to project managers.
The team at Riley leverages the seamless integration between GCPay and Vista Viewpoint.
Vince wraps up telling us “I think everyone at Riley understands that there’s really intangible value in GCPay in addition to the obvious benefits. This is process improvement and efficiency that we are benefiting from.”
See GCPay in Action!
GCPay’s best-in-class pay app software integrates seamlessly with construction’s top ERP systems to simplify your process.
