One Operating System for the Whole Business

At a glance

• The challenge: A fast-growing electrical contractor was running on tools that couldn't keep up. Quoting bottlenecked on one person, and the financial picture lived in scattered spreadsheets.
• What we did: Put a connected operating stack in place and built the custom pieces to tie it together.
• The result: Roughly 20 hours of manual work recovered every month, with estimates going out in half the time.

The challenge

Dayton Power & Controls was growing fast. They'd built a strong reputation in data centers, industrial automation, and commercial electrical work, and the work kept coming. The challenge was never capability or demand. It was that the tools the business ran on hadn't kept pace with the business they'd built.

• Sales throughput was gated by one person. Every quote ran through Rhys, on his own time. "I was spending all my free time on weekends just quoting jobs and making revisions," he says. "I was manually calculating profit margins. Time-consuming and wide open for error."
• Estimates didn't reflect the quality of the work. "Our estimates looked unprofessional compared to what larger competitors were providing," Rhys says. "We were losing opportunities to companies that simply looked more established on paper."
• Spend was uncontrolled. Both founders' personal credit cards were passed around the whole team. No limits, no way to see where money was going without pulling statements by hand.
• The financial picture was assembled by hand. Numbers were scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and memory. Getting a real read on the business took hours and still left open questions.

What we built

We didn't fix one workflow. We built the foundation the whole business now runs on: the right tools, connected into one stack, plus the custom pieces that tied them together.

Tools we put in place

• Slack: internal communication, replacing scattered texts and email threads.
• CompanyCam: day-to-day project documentation and field tracking.
• JobTread: estimating and project management, so the team owns quoting end to end.
• QuickBooks Online: bookkeeping, giving the business a single source of financial truth.
• Ramp: spend management and accounts payable, replacing shared personal cards with real controls and per-card limits.

What we custom-built

• Unified metrics dashboard. Pulls live data from QuickBooks Online and JobTread into one view: project revenue, costs, margins, and cash position. No more pulling numbers from three places and hoping they add up.
• Invoice inbox. A dedicated email address for vendor invoices. The team forwards a PDF; it reads the document, extracts line items and amounts, and updates the product catalog automatically. Manual data entry, gone.
• Automated employee onboarding. When a new hire joins, account provisioning runs automatically: email setup, Slack invite, tool access. The right access is in place before day one.

Results

Goal: save 10 hours a month on manual admin.
Outcome: the combined recovery across estimating, invoicing, and reconciliation came to roughly 20 hours a month, double the target.

Goal: cut estimate creation time 25%.
Outcome: turnaround dropped by 50%, twice the target, and the process no longer runs through one person. What used to consume a full weekend now takes a few hours.

Goal: reduce material price variance in job costing 25%.
Outcome: variance is down roughly 30%. Margins are calculated automatically, and Rhys can revise an estimate on the fly without redoing the math by hand.

Goal: spend under control.
Outcome: Ramp replaced the shared personal cards entirely. Every transaction has a home, a limit, and a record, visible in real time instead of three weeks later during reconciliation.

Goal: one source of financial truth.
Outcome: the metrics dashboard surfaces revenue, cost, margin, and cash in one place. Reporting that used to take hours of spreadsheet assembly now takes minutes.

The bigger shift is clarity: decisions that used to require hours of digging now take minutes.

"The difference has been night and day. What used to consume my entire weekend now takes a few hours. I can revise on the fly, and I know our pricing is accurate and our margins are where they need to be."

— Rhys, Co-founder, Dayton Power & Controls

What's next

This is an ongoing engagement. Abstract Digital hosts, maintains, and extends the stack as Dayton Power & Controls grows. When the business changes, the build changes with it. That's the point of doing it right the first time.