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For a lot of construction companies, "the office" comes with a list of requirements. A bill needs a signature, so it waits on a desk until the right person walks by. It needs to go into QuickBooks, so someone sits down and types it in, one bill at a time, out of a stack that just seems to keep growing.
The stack that didn't shrink
Locke Buildings, a Portland, Oregon pole-building company with more than 3,000 buildings completed across the Pacific Northwest, ran AP this way for years. Office Manager Trina Brockway spent 10-12 hours a week printing bills, tracking down signatures, and manually entering data into QuickBooks, on top of everything else her role already covered. With 500 or more bills coming in every month, that task ate up most of her week.
"We had a system that worked, but it was slow, manual, and tied to the office," Trina said.
The paper-and-signature model also limited who could weigh in and how well. Project managers had little visibility into the line-item detail of what they were signing off on. They saw only a vendor name and a total, without much context behind it. Questions about a bill ended up in an email thread or scribbled in the margin of a printed page. Either way, they stayed disconnected from the bill itself.
Any approval process built around a physical object moving through a physical space runs into this same wall eventually. Locke's size just meant they hit that wall sooner.
Why office-bound approval breaks down as bill volume grows
Paper-based approval scales at low volume. A handful of bills a week can move through an in-office chain without much friction, since someone is almost always available to print, sign, and enter it. The loop closes in a day or two.
The trouble starts when volume rises to a level like Locke's, up to several hundred bills a month. Signature-based processes have fixed capacities that don't stretch. Every bill still needs a physical object to move from desk to desk, still needs a person available at the moment it arrives, and still needs a second pass to key the data in after the signature is collected. As the number of bills increases, those steps compete for the same finite hours.
Construction adds a second layer on top of this. The people with authority to approve a bill, like project managers and supervisors, are usually on a job site, not at a desk. Paper processes rely on their presence to sign something. So when they're not available, the bill waits.
Hiring doesn't fix an office-bound process
The natural response to a growing AP backlog is to add a new person, like a new office administrator, to help print bills and chase signatures. It's a reasonable instinct, and it clears some of the immediate backlog. But, the issue remains: two people printing and chasing signatures still need a desk and a printer in the same room to do it. Add staff to an office-bound process and the company buys itself more capacity, but the constraint doesn’t budge. General Manager Andy Price recognized this before it became a hiring problem. What Locke needed was a way to manage approvals and capture line-item detail without being tied to one physical location.
What moving approval off paper changed
Locke moved its entire AP approval process to MakersHub. Line-item detail and job coding are captured automatically from every bill as it comes in (vendor information included). Bills route directly to the project manager responsible for that job instead of a shared inbox. PMs review and approve from a job site with the full line-item detail attached, instead of a vendor name and a total. Notes and questions attach directly to the bill record itself, so a question about a line item stays connected to the bill instead of living in a separate email thread someone has to go find later. Once approved, the bill syncs to QuickBooks without anyone re-entering it.
Locke’s AP processing dropped from 10-12 hours a week to two hours. Trina now works from home four days a week, something the old paper-based process made structurally impossible.
"It's the same process we had before, it's just way faster with MakersHub," Trina said. "It's given me back hours of time.”
Andy Price sees the shift more from the reporting side: "There's now more data in QuickBooks, giving us a more accurate and comprehensive view of the business." Bills that used to arrive at the books as a total and a signature now arrive with the coding and context that make the number in QuickBooks useful for tracking costs.
What to look for in remote-capable AP approvals
Does approval require a desktop login or physical signature?
If review only works from one machine or one physical location, the process stays tied to whoever can get there, no matter how digitized the rest of it looks.
Does line-item context travel with the bill, or live somewhere else?
A PM approving from a job site needs the same detail an in-office approver would have. If that detail sits in a separate email thread or a paper file, remote approval is really just the approver's best guess from wherever they're sitting.
Does the approved bill reach QuickBooks without a second entry step?
Digitizing approval only to require manual re-entry afterward moves the bottleneck instead of removing it.
Does routing reflect who's responsible for the job?
A single generic approval chain doesn't hold up in construction, where authority is usually split by project and by dollar threshold, not assigned to one person for every bill.