From 10 Days to One: How Haynes Mechanical Closed Their Books 90% Faster on Finance Hub

Haynes Mechanical is approaching its 59th year in business. Family-owned and privately held, the Denver-based contractor has grown to four locations, with service work at the center of what it does.

But that history does not mean Haynes is standing still. Patrick McFarlen, CFO, says the company is still focused on becoming bigger, more efficient, and better able to support growth. 

For him, that means giving the business a dependable connection between the work happening in the business and the financial information leadership uses to run it.

Customer snapshot

• Company: Haynes Mechanical Systems
• Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
• Locations: Four
• Business: Family-owned, privately held commercial mechanical contractor
• Focus: Service, rebuild, and replacement work
• BuildOps customer since: June 2024
• ERP: Sage Intacct

The challenge: Reconciling operational and financial data took time

Haynes Mechanical had the operational data it needed on BuildOps; the harder part was reconciling that data with financials across four locations, multiple revenue streams, and hundreds of active contracts and projects.

Before Finance Hub, the two systems did not always reconcile cleanly, which made it difficult to know whether the operational data and financial statements were telling the same story.

That mattered across every part of the business. Haynes had approximately 250 projects and 1,300 contracts, and each category of work had its own revenue-recognition requirements. The finance team reconciled agreements, time and materials work, and project revenue separately. It also had to account for four different locations.

“Before we would wait until month end and then when we couldn’t reconcile at some level we would start our research,” says Patrick, “and that research could last for hours, it could last a day, it could last multiple people, multiple days.”

The process was reactive. The team spent time finding errors after they had already accumulated, leaving less time to plan for the future.

“If I’m spending all my time trying to figure out how to reconcile items, I’m not spending my time analyzing the information and really trying to figure out where we have to improve or how we get better,” says Patrick. 

The solution: A daily connection between BuildOps and Intacct

Finance Hub sits between BuildOps and Intacct as a financial control layer for Haynes. It connects field activity, job cost, work in progress, exceptions, close, audit, and the handoff to the ERP in one view. Transactions are checked, coded, approved, and tracked before they reach the accounting system, giving Haynes a clearer way to trace a sync issue back to its source and correct it while there is still time to act.

For Haynes, the shift was from doing detective work to uncover the problem to working on the cause throughout the month.

“With Finance Hub, you can identify the issue the day that it happens, you can see the sync error, you can see what’s going on with it, and you can fix it,” says Patrick.

The value: Quicker close, more trusted data, and more time to look ahead

Haynes went live with Finance Hub in July and used it for its July close. McFarlen said 98% of the errors were already cleaned up, and reconciliation took a couple of hours instead of four to eight hours or a couple of days.

“Month one was good and I think it’s gonna continue to get better every month after that.”

By the following month, McFarlen said Haynes was 100% synced in Finance Hub.

One source of truth for operations and finance

For Haynes, speed is only part of the improvement. Supervisors and technicians rely on operational data in BuildOps, while leadership relies on financial reporting. If those numbers do not match, people lose confidence in the information they use to manage their work.

“At the end of the day, when you have so much data out there and people are relying on that data, it has to reconcile from both the operational standpoint and the financial standpoint,” says Patrick.

For the first time, Haynes was able to reconcile all of its project expenses from BuildOps into Intacct. Previously, the team considered a variance of $5,000 to $10,000 acceptable. With Finance Hub, the goal became a complete reconciliation rather than an approximation.

More time to improve the business

Resolving issues daily gives Haynes’ finance team more time to use the data, not just assemble it. McFarlen can spend more time analyzing performance, preparing information for management and the board, and identifying where the company needs to improve.

“Anytime BuildOps gives me more time back, I can then spend it making the company better.”

Better data means better performing teams. McFarlen says Haynes expects supervisors to understand their agreement portfolios, technicians, and open time-and-materials work. That accountability depends on data they can trust.

“If we’re not giving them live data or if they don’t trust that live data, it’s really hard for us to hold them accountable,” says Patrick.

A partnership built around growing together

Haynes chose BuildOps because it needed a system that was as committed to continually improving as they were. 

After using BuildOps, Haynes technicians, McFarlen said, are not simply tolerating new technology, they are asking for more of it when they see how it can improve their jobs.

“Our technicians get excited and they want to be the person that shows BuildOps team members around during onsite visits because they know that there’ll be an improvement to the system, an improvement to the mobile app, or whatever is next coming out of it,” says Patrick.

He sees Haynes’ and BuildOps partnership behind Finance Hub as just one example of this commitment: the daily support, fast responses, and willingness to keep improving the product with customer input.

“When we looked at BuildOps and really that partnership, we needed a system that could grow with us.”