Foster's growth plan depended on margin data it could trust, on the big commercial jobs and the smaller service jobs alike. The AP process that fed that data ran on paper, and it was built for record-keeping, not analysis.

POs were generated on the fly by technicians through a digital form, then matched to bills entirely by hand. Every week, someone spent at least half a day on the matching alone: stamping each bill so project managers had somewhere to mark their approval, sorting the stacks into piles by approver, scanning everything, and hoping the scanner didn't pull two pages at once and lose a bill in the process. When the PMs marked their digital approvals, the team copied those marks back onto the paper by hand. Then they keyed every bill into QuickBooks Desktop, linked the POs, stapled, and filed by vendor.
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"We were killing small forests every day."

Brittany Tam

Accounting Lead

The paper cost more than time. It made AP the gatekeeper of the company's cost information, which is the opposite of what a data-driven strategy needs. And it sat on top of a second, quieter problem: Canadian sales tax.

Foster tracks two layers. Federal GST, which the business recovers, and provincial PST, which flows straight into job costs. QuickBooks Desktop calculates tax on the subtotal. Foster's largest supplier calculates it line by line, then sums the rounded amounts. Across 200 to 300 bills a month from that one vendor, the two methods landed a cent or two apart, every time, on each of the two taxes. Someone had to find and true up every difference by hand.

The amounts were small. The stakes were not. When PST is misapplied, it lands directly in job costs, so the books stop reflecting what a job actually cost. On a bill carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, a misapplied tax is real margin. And the discrepancies, left alone, stop the books from closing cleanly.
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If we can't get those little details dialed in, how can you trust the bigger picture?. It's always a matter of trust. How much can I trust what these reports are telling me?

Brittany Tam

Accounting Lead

Replacing QuickBooks Desktop wasn't the move. The only real alternative was a large, costly ERP migration Foster wasn't ready for, with other priorities ahead of it. The one comparable tool the team evaluated cost more and did less. "We could have hired another full-time person," Brittany notes. The question came down to this: do we hire software, or do we hire people?

MakersHub gave Foster a modern AP layer on top of the accounting system it already had, and extended the working life of QuickBooks Desktop instead of forcing a migration off it.
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"If this is the house we have to live in, we want to make the house livable."

Brittany Tam

Accounting Lead

What that looks like in practice:

• Bills and line items captured digitally. The printing, scanning and hand-keying cycle is gone. So is the risk of a scanner eating a page.
• POs matched and approvals routed in the platform. Project managers approve where the work lives, instead of marking up paper that someone then transcribes by hand.
• GST and PST reconciled automatically. MakersHub reads tax at the line-item level, surfaces every place the supplier's math disagrees with QuickBooks Desktop's subtotal rounding, and trues it up. The penny-by-penny hunt across 200 to 300 monthly bills is handled.
• Consolidated bills synced to QuickBooks Desktop with full line-item detail retained for search, reporting and export, even when the data file is large enough to choke QuickBooks' own import tools.
• Approval rules adjusted as the team changes. Brittany can update workflows quickly as people join, audit the results without it eating her day, and keep an audit trail everyone can see.
• Because the platform handles the data entry, Brittany's team moved from keying numbers to checking them: confirming job coding and catching tax misapplications that matter when a single bill can carry six figures of equipment.

A new staff accountant came up to speed quickly, and Foster is rolling MakersHub out to its sister company in Duncan, where the existing accountant, self-described as no fan of change, was working in it comfortably within a day.

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