.svg)
Foster Heating & Cooling wanted to grow on margin numbers it could trust. Its accounts payable process ran on paper. MakersHub fixed that on top of QuickBooks Desktop, with no ERP migration.
A new mandate
Foster has served Victoria and Vancouver Island since 1928: residential and commercial HVAC, from service calls to retrofits to new builds. The scale is real. Roughly 1,000 new service jobs a month, more than 30 technicians, and a back-office team of 10 to 11.
For most of its history Foster was run by technicians-turned-owners. A few years ago Mitch Allen acquired the business and brought a finance background to the owner's seat, with a plan to grow on the numbers. Brittany Tam, who took over as accounting lead when Foster's longtime accountant retired, had to make those numbers trustworthy.
When your books run on paper
Foster's growth plan depended on trusting the margin on every job. The AP process feeding that data ran on paper.
Technicians raised POs on the fly so costs could be allocated to jobs. Everything after that was manual. Every week, someone spent at least half a day stamping bills for approval, sorting them into piles by approver, scanning the stacks, copying the PMs' digital approvals back onto paper, then keying every bill into QuickBooks Desktop and filing by vendor.
Worse than the time, the paper made AP the gatekeeper of every cost. Nobody could see a job without someone digging it out of a folder.
The penny problem nobody could close
Underneath the paper sat a quieter problem: Canadian sales tax. QuickBooks Desktop calculates tax on the subtotal; Foster's largest supplier calculates it line by line. Across 200 to 300 bills a month, on both GST and PST, the totals always landed a cent or two apart, and someone trued up every one by hand. Small amounts, but PST flows straight into job costs, so the books stopped reflecting what jobs actually cost.
Replacing QuickBooks Desktop meant a costly ERP migration Foster wasn't ready for. The one comparable AP tool the team looked at cost more and did less. "We could have hired another full-time person," Brittany notes. Hire software, or hire people?
Making the house livable
MakersHub gave Foster a modern AP layer on top of QuickBooks Desktop, and extended its working life instead of forcing a migration.
Bills captured digitally at the line level. No more printing, scanning or hand-keying.
- Approvals routed in-platform. PMs approve where the work lives, not on paper someone retypes.
- GST and PST reconciled automatically. MakersHub reads tax line by line and trues up every disagreement with QuickBooks' subtotal rounding.
- Approval rules adjusted as the team grows, with an audit trail everyone can see.
Costing a job while it's still open
Before each monthly meeting with the commercial construction team, Brittany links the cost detail straight to the bills in MakersHub. When a manager asks about a job, she opens the source on the spot instead of digging through folders and emails. On a long job, that's the difference between catching an overrun in time and finding it after close.
We want to know right now. We don't want to know when the job is done and everything is closed out.
— Brittany Tam
What changed
Half a day a week back, before counting the printing, scanning and keying on top.
- ~1,000 jobs a month costed on current data, visible to PMs without going through AP.
- Every line reconciled to the penny across 200 to 300 monthly bills, on both taxes, so the books close clean.
AP stopped being a backwater and became a source of truth. Brittany's team checks the numbers now instead of keying them. And it's holding as Foster grows: a new staff accountant ramped fast, and the rollout to Foster's sister company in Duncan won over an accountant who, by her own account, is no fan of change, inside a day.
FAQs
- Does MakersHub work with QuickBooks Desktop?
- Yes. MakersHub adds an AP layer on top of QuickBooks Desktop, capturing bills at the line level and syncing them back to the ledger, so businesses can modernize AP without an ERP migration.
- Can MakersHub handle Canadian GST and PST reconciliation?
- Yes. MakersHub reads tax line by line and flags discrepancies with how QuickBooks Desktop calculates tax on subtotals, truing up cent-level differences on both GST and PST automatically.
- Is MakersHub a fit for HVAC and trades businesses doing job costing?
- Yes. MakersHub supports PO matching, job and cost allocation, line-level coding and custom approval routing, so project managers can see and approve job costs in real time.
Ready to grow on data you can trust?