How Fusion unlocked visibility on production and cut down on time spent invoicing

An infrastructure contractor switched to Clad to keep up with their rapid expansion into new markets. Now, they have visibility into production data every week without having to chase down Excel sheets and paper redlines from crews in multiple states. Their back office uses Clad to create QuickBooks invoices directly from this production data, cutting 15 hours each week out of their invoicing process.

About the team

Fusion Telecom Services is a veteran-owned contractor that specializes in fiber installation, splicing, and infrastructure deployment. The day-to-day field and financial operations sit with three people: Mike (Director of Operations), Cari (Director of AP/HR) and Ryan (Director of Safety/IT). With the back office staff wearing multiple hats, every minute saved on administrative tasks counts.

The challenge: Struggling to find and invoice with weekly production data

When Fusion started out, all of their work was for one customer near their home base in Missouri, and it was easy to keep up with daily production.

As the company expanded, Mike, the Director of Operations, built an internal production tracking process, requiring each crew to send daily Excel reports via email. However, the accumulation of reports in multiple inboxes quickly made it impossible to see all of their production in one place.

“You were trying to keep track of five or six different daily reports throughout the week for each project, and in some cities we're doing three to six projects a day,” Mike says. From where he worked in Missouri, jobs in Minnesota were hardest to track. “They're up there, we're down here. A lot of times there weren’t even reports getting to us.”

If a number looked wrong, tracking down the mistake could take three or four hours of looking at bore runs, or playing phone tag to hunt down the right answer.

Invoicing also became time consuming. Cari would submit invoices for the previous week’s work every Wednesday, and she often found herself scrambling to keep up as final production reports came in on Tuesday mornings.

On typical fiber projects, “it was really a lot of spreadsheet to spreadsheet to QuickBooks,” Cari says. For 10 to 20 invoices each week, she had to manually type up to 25 line items from Excel into QuickBooks. “Each invoice took about 45 minutes—and God forbid there’s a mistake!” she adds. If Fusion’s spreadsheet didn’t match what the customer expected, she had to find the mistake and fix it in three places.

Smaller drops jobs required a separate process. Drops work was growing so quickly that Ryan, Director of IT, stepped in to help, which added hours of form-building, data transfer, and tracking down mismatched numbers to his workload.

“We've looked at all the software… there's nothing out there that translates production into QuickBooks the way Clad does. I’m getting 12–14 hours back a week.”

With Clad: Visibility across every project

Every Fusion project now lives in Clad, including a summary of percentage complete for each job and flexible reporting views that summarize progress across markets. “One thing I like the most is taking all the files for the project and them being all in one location,” Mike says. “Before, we had to take them from the customer's SharePoint, create a folder in our SharePoint, put them in there. Most of the time they didn't get in there. Now everything is just there, and if anyone has a question, they can look at it.”

Mike benefits from the easy visibility into production data every week when he has to put together a required street sheet for one of his customers, which lists total and completed footage for the streets scheduled in the next week. It used to mean finding a project’s BOM in SharePoint, then adding up every QuickBooks invoice ever sent on the project. “Now it's just three clicks. Probably 45 minutes the old way. The new way, two minutes.”

Invoicing takes minutes, not hours

Clad has also eliminated manual invoice creation from Cari’s workload. “When I go in to do invoicing, I don't have to do all that spreadsheet to spreadsheet to QuickBooks nonsense. It's already done.” Cari selects the projects and dates she wants to invoice for, and Clad generates an invoice directly in QuickBooks in seconds.

The invoices aren’t just faster. They’re also more accurate. “Mike can see any mistakes before it gets to the customer,” Cari says. “It’s a lot easier for him to catch things now.”

As Fusion continues to grow, Clad allows the team to take on more work without adding new administrative costs. Given how quick and easy Clad makes their billing process, Mike says, “I don't think we would ever have to bring on another admin person on the invoicing side.”

“Clad is designed for the work that we do. This is built for our industry and it just makes it easier for everybody. I think the whole company's benefited.”