How Woodcliff Builders grew their construction business with Quickbooks Online Advanced

Woodcliff Builders Co-owner and CEO Joey Kochanski can tackle any general contracting task, from installing doors to building the house of his clients’ dreams. When he first went into business for himself, however, accounting proved to be more than a little overwhelming. 

“I didn't know profit and loss,” Kochanski says. “I didn't know taxes.”

Co-owner and COO Nina Kochanski eventually left her high-paying tech job to join Joey in the family-owned business, but as he puts it, “She walked into a huge mess.”

Thankfully for the Kochanskis, Joey’s father had previously gifted him a manual detailing how to use QuickBooks. Nina came across it one day, and soon enough, she found herself tooling around with QuickBooks Online Advanced—a decision that would forever change their business.

“It was very easy and intuitive to set up,” says Nina. “Then I kind of just started jamming away at it.”

Since then, the co-owners have been delighted to discover how many tedious, previously overwhelming chores Intuit’s business solutions hub can take off their hands. The best part? Beyond streamlining their business’s operations management, Nina adds that QuickBooks Online Advanced has “helped with our cash flow tenfold.”

Put simply, Nina says, “QuickBooks Online Advanced made it so that everything lived in one place.”

‘It was just so much easier’: The relief of organizing everything on one platform

As a full-service general contracting business, The Kochanskis love to translate their clients’ dreams into blueprints and brick-and-mortar buildings—structures that will inspire memories for years to come. But that can be hard to do when you’re scattered trying to organize receipts and invoices, keep track of your employees, and chase down payments in person.

With Quickbooks, the Kochanskis can spend less time chasing down stray records and more time thinking strategically. One feature that’s come in handy? Receipt tracking.

“QuickBooks Online Advanced allowed us to start tracking receipts by project, which then gave us so much more insight into profitability per project,” says Nina.

With QuickBooks Invoicing the Kochanskis can now receive payments online and update projects remotely. “If I'm meeting with a client and they wanted to add something to that project, I could send over a change order right from my phone,” Joey says. “It was just so much easier to track stuff.”

Nina has also seen the difference since switching to QuickBooks Invoicing: “Every single one of our projects has a payment schedule that's built out,” she says. “Now with people being able to pay online, I'm not running around to job sites chasing checks around.”

QuickBooks has made a difference for the Kochanskis’ employees as well. Now, they can more easily track their many simultaneous projects.

“QuickBooks Time has been huge because now our employees, they're able to track by the hour what project they're working on,” says Nina.

At times, Joey explains, some of Woodcliff Builders’ employees are working on two or three projects in a single day. “So being able to geo-track the guys and know automatically what jobs they're at and where they're going has just been game changing for us,” he says.

The end goal: ‘Ease for our clients’

The Kochanskis know better than most how to build something that can scrape the sky, but even so, Nina says that Intuit’s all-in-one accounting solution has allowed their business to reach new heights.

“QuickBooks Online Advanced has made it possible for us to grow because it's constantly working with those other technologies we're taking on,” she says. The end goal, she adds, “is ease for our clients.”

 Perhaps even more importantly, Nina observes, the service has also allowed them “to know that we're growing and that we get to invest money back into our business.”

That reassurance (and the relief of being able to focus on his real job instead of working part-time as his own accountant) has allowed Joey to fully embrace the passion that brought him to this work in the first place.

 “It really is putting a lot more joy or spark into my craftsman side, and it gives us the time to enjoy our time together as a family,” he says.

For all the time the Kochanskis spend constructing other people’s aspirations, Nina values the way QuickBooks Online Advanced has helped her and Joey nurture their own ambitions.

 “We're building something that this next generation gets to see,” Nina says. “I don't know what the future holds, it's pretty exciting.”