Lisa Wright is the controller at Lawson Roofing — a family-owned contractor that has been providing roofing and waterproofing services around San Francisco since 1907. Her day-to-day can get extremely busy as she manages all of the company’s accounting, project administration, and human resources.
Thankfully, she has a great team reporting to her, and she has the right technology in place to help her team and herself work as efficiently as possible — especially when it comes to securing revenue with lien rights.
Read the case study below to learn more.
The challenge
First and foremost, managing a team of professionals who all have different roles but are all responsible for securing company revenue, can be a point of difficulty.
“My biggest challenge is managing people and making sure that everybody is not only on-task, but collaborating as well,” says Lisa.
As it pertains to receivables, Lisa has a billing specialist, collections manager, and project accountant reporting to her. Not only does Lisa need to ensure that each team member is on task, but she also needs to make sure they have the tools to work efficiently. Especially when it comes to protecting lien rights — a process that is very time-sensitive.
“When I started at Lawson Roofing, I realized that our jobs weren’t always being preliened because it was such a manual process. I saw how paperwork was done by hand, and it wasn’t very efficient. I could understand why the team wasn’t sending a preliminary notice on every job because it was just so time-consuming,” explains Lisa.
Lisa knew that payment paperwork didn’t need to be such a burden because she had used Levelset’s automated lien rights management solution at her past company, so she made the decision to partner with Levelsest at Lawson Roofing.
The solution
With Levelset implemented in the office, Lisa is able to help her team truly work as a team, and have oversight over everything that pertains to lien rights paperwork and collections.
“Currently, we have the Accounts Receivable/Billing Coordinator using Levelset for lien releases. Our Collections Specialist is using Levelset to track the lien deadlines for collections purposes, and our Project Accountant files the preliminary lien notices through Levelset at the start of each project,” Lisa says.
In all of this, Lisa is able to easily keep up with the status of paperwork and payments on all of their active jobs in Levelset. With everything in a cloud-based database, Lisa can easily track the health of their receivables and can quickly take the right collections actions based on what she’s seeing in Levelset.
Another helpful Levelset feature that Lisa uses to collaborate with her team is Job Radar. These alerts provide insight into the payment actions happening on their jobs.
“When we get an alert that says someone has filed a lien on a project, I can go to my collections team and ask if we’re owed any money or where we stand on the project. Those alerts have been really helpful,” says Lisa.
Not only do they have more insight into what’s happening on their jobs, but they are more protected now that they can send more notices and secure lien rights on more of their jobs.
“We are no longer manually filling our releases. Those have been automated and it’s great. Also, Levelset reminds us of deadlines so we don’t need to do any separate tracking. This saves us a ton of time,” Lisa says.
Lisa also uses Scout Research — Levelset’s job information and property detail research solution to confirm that they have accurate information on their paperwork.
“The fact that Levelset will find the correct owner and the location exactly how it’s supposed to be on our notices is my favorite part of the solution because it offers the biggest time savings, with the most accuracy,” Lisa says.
The results
Lisa and her team are now able to protect many more of their jobs with the proper notices, thanks to the efficiency presented by Levelset.
“We’re currently protecting 300 to 400 jobs per year through Levelset, and before we only protected 100 or so jobs, if that,” says Lisa.
Not only can they ensure more of their receivables are protected, but also, they aren’t dealing with any major payment problems.
“Levelest makes it easy to file a notice of intent to lien or a lien when you aren’t getting paid. Using those tools has really increased our security. We’ve never had to file suit since using Levelset because the solutions they offer have worked,” Lisa says.
Discover how other subcontractors are partnering with Levelset to protect revenue and run collections operations more efficiently.