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Table of contents
Table of contents
Results at a glance
- 92% reduction in payroll processing time (from 2 hours to 15 minutes per run)
- 40–50 hours in employee time saved annually on payroll
- 8 hours per month saved on bank reconciliation with live bank feeds
- $20K–$40K reconciliation gap eliminated between books and bank
27 years of manual bookkeeping catches up with a growing firm
Landtech Resources Incorporated (LRI) is a land surveying and civil engineering firm based in Williamsburg, Virginia, founded in 1998. The company supports projects ranging from individual residential lot site plans to 150–200 lot developments, alongside construction stakeout and site engineering services. LRI employs approximately 20–23 staff workers, including seasonal survey crews and interns, and generates close to $4 million in annual revenue.
Chase Grogg is Vice President and Survey Coordinator at LRI and one of the firm's partners. In addition to overseeing survey operations, Chase has recently taken on informal HR and accounting responsibilities, including payroll and deposits.
Manual payroll and a $20,000-$40,000 reconciliation gap on QuickBooks Desktop
LRI had used QuickBooks in some form since the company's founding in 1998. As the business grew, the firm outgrew QuickBooks Desktop Plus. They required an upgrade to QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise after hitting a hard limit on the number of contacts and jobs the file could hold.
Even on Enterprise, the software ran locally on a single office computer rather than a server, creating regular access bottlenecks for LRI's three to four QuickBooks users and for the firm's outside accountant, who remoted into the same machine for tax work.
“It felt like once a day, if not more, we had to restart, tell that employee that she needed to restart her computer…. Having to restart that so that we could get into the file was always kind of fun to yell down the hallway to tell her.”
Chase estimates these connectivity issues cost the team 30 minutes to an hour per week. Payroll was run manually, paper checks were cut, hours were entered by hand from employee spreadsheets, and payroll taxes were filed directly through state and federal tax websites. A full cycle took an hour and a half to two hours, typically run by one of the firm's highest-paid employees.
Furthermore, bank activity wasn't connected to QuickBooks at all. To approximate cash position, staff manually pre-entered recurring payments (loan installments, auto payments, and similar debts) at the start of each month, regardless of when they actually cleared the bank. This created a persistent gap between the bank balance and the QuickBooks balance.
Invoicing was similarly manual. LRI's civil engineering team used a separate project management third-party tool to generate invoices, but with no integration to Desktop, invoices were printed, filed in a binder, matched to incoming payments by hand, and walked back to the third-party team to mark as paid.
It would be a $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 difference if you looked at what was in the bank versus what was in our QuickBooks Desktop.
A new accountant's recommendation pushes Landtech Resources to QuickBooks Online Advanced
The catalyst for change was twofold: LRI switched accounting firms, and the new accountant highlighted QuickBooks Online's operational advantages over Desktop Enterprise — particularly around payroll, direct deposit, and bank connectivity. The accountant's own experience remoting into LRI's single Desktop Enterprise machine, and hitting the same access conflicts as LRI's staff, reinforced the case for a cloud-based solution.
QuickBooks Online Advanced was selected specifically on the accountant's recommendation, over other QuickBooks accounting solutions. The decision was driven by LRI's payroll and tax needs, a higher user-seat allowance, and discounted pricing available through the accounting firm's batch account program.
“QuickBooks Online Advanced makes payroll much easier. We can now do direct deposit. With Desktop, payroll could take an hour and a half to two hours… now I do payroll in a matter of, like, 15 minutes.”
A weekend migration moves 25 years of QuickBooks data with zero downtime
LRI migrated its full company file, including more than 25 years of accounting history, from QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise to QuickBooks Online Advanced in January-February of this year. The team deliberately timed the cutover for a weekend immediately following a payroll run, giving them a two-week buffer before the next payroll cycle to resolve any issues.
The file export and upload ran overnight and was completed without incident, despite its size and age. LRI did not work with a dedicated product expert and instead relied on its accounting firm for guidance, describing the approach as largely self-directed.
We basically moved to QuickBooks Online Advanced over the weekend and didn't miss a beat. By Monday, even with a company file of over 25 years, it was uploaded and up and running pretty quickly.
— Chase Grogg, Vice President, Landtech Resources Incorporated
How QuickBooks Online Advanced saves Landtech Resources 40–50 hours per year on payroll
Compared to QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, Chase points to several concrete gains:
- Payroll efficiency: Direct deposit and QuickBooks Time integration cut payroll processing from up to two hours to about 15 minutes per cycle, for an estimated 40–50 hours, or roughly a full work week, returned to the business annually.
- Reliable multi-user access: Cloud access eliminated the daily file-access conflicts and forced computer restarts that came with a single-machine Desktop Enterprise setup, including for LRI's outside accountant.
- Live bank connectivity: Linking bank and credit card accounts directly to QuickBooks Online Advanced closed the $20,000–$40,000 gap that previously existed between LRI's books and its actual bank balance, and now surfaces new transactions for review each morning rather than a month or more later.
- Automated invoicing: QuickBooks Online Advanced integration with LRI's project management software replaced a manual, paper-based invoice-and-payment-matching process on Desktop, saving an estimated 3–4 hours per month.
Beyond these top-line benefits, Chase pointed to the general ease of daily bookkeeping: QuickBooks Online Advanced's transaction-matching rules post recurring items like loan payments and utility bills automatically once configured, removing the need to hand-enter the same transactions every month.
Why Landtech Resources would recommend QuickBooks Online Advanced to other Desktop users
Chase describes QuickBooks Online Advanced as having fully met LRI's expectations: the firm switched with clear goals around payroll and reconciliation, and the software delivered on both without introducing new complications.
I'm for sure glad that we switched from Desktop Enterprise to QuickBooks Online Advanced... it meets the expectations of what we need it to.
Chase points directly to cumbersome data entry and reconciliation as the clearest signal it's time to move away from Desktop:
“If you currently have heavy data entry, you can save a lot of time by having your bank account and credit cards linked to the QuickBooks Online Advanced interface, as well as getting real-time information about your company… rather than the waiting that happens with Desktop, which ends up being like a month and a half of time spent, just to reconcile your bank statement.”
Looking ahead, LRI is evaluating the newer construction estimating features as a potential replacement for its separate estimating software in order to realize even more beneficial efficiencies from QuickBooks Online Advanced.
*Real customer compensated for time
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