Nation’s largest construction-focused accounting firm manages 100+ entities with Intuit Enterprise Suite

Largest US construction-focused accounting firm

RedHammer is the largest construction-focused Client Accounting Services firm (CAS) in the US, with 80+ construction accountants managing over 135 total entities. As clients scale toward the $10M – $30M revenue mark, they historically faced a challenge Partner Scott Franchini calls the “technological lull,” a point where customers outgrew basic accounting tools, but were repelled by the $100,000 to $250,000 implementation costs of traditional ERPs. By partnering with Intuit Enterprise Suite, RedHammer is now migrating its 104-client portfolio into a modern, AI-powered ecosystem that bridges the gap between mid-market functionality and enterprise-grade technology.

The client fear of modernization

For RedHammer’s clients, staying on legacy systems was a massive financial and efficiency drain. Franchini states that as clients sought more functionality, they often moved to hosted solutions where “functionality goes up, but technology goes down.” These systems lacked the necessary APIs, forcing “the enormous burden” of accountants to manually download and import transactions for bank reconciliations.

When onboarding new clients, RedHammer frequently encountered 4- to 8-week delays driven by heavy data rework. The root cause was rarely the software itself; instead, it was that the system had never been configured correctly, degrading data quality over time. That experience led many clients to believe they had outgrown QuickBooks. “The idea that QuickBooks is just training wheels is one of the biggest misconceptions,” Franchini says. “'The system can do far more than most companies realize. The problem is setup, not software.” Yet, rather than fix the configuration, clients were tempted to leave for vendors that promised better construction functionality but delivered it on platforms with poor usability and little to no integration.

A construction-specific financial solution

Intuit Enterprise Suite emerged as the top choice for RedHammer by offering a modern SaaS alternative to the “archaic remote access” of desktop environments. For Franchini, the Intuit ERP specifically addressed the construction industry’s most painful hurdles through several key pillars:

• Unified project lifecycle flow: RedHammer now manages the complete operational loop — Estimate → Budget → Change Order → Invoice — within one native environment. Franchini highlights that Intuit Enterprise Suite “finally connects how construction companies do business with how they manage money.” By splitting the estimate (the contract) from the internal budget, the firm can bill at the high-level Schedule of Values (SOV) while costing at the granular item level.
• Change Order management: Historically, accountants used complex workarounds or manual spreadsheets to track contract modifications. With the construction edition of Intuit Enterprise Suite, change orders now funnel directly into the project phases. This ensures that progress invoices automatically reflect the “completed available amount,” reducing manual errors and significantly accelerating cash flow.
• Multi-entity consolidation: Intuit Enterprise Suite allowed RedHammer to manage intercompany transactions and consolidated reporting without the “ridiculous price tag” of systems like NetSuite or Sage Intacct.
• Spreadsheet sync: Alleviated significant burden for RedHammer’s team of 80+ accountants, allowing them to extract, cleanse, and re-sync job estimates, budgets, and costs to scale.
• AIA-style progress invoicing: Intuit Enterprise Suite addressed Franchini’s “final frontier” of construction billing by incorporating milestone grouping and sequential progress invoicing, ensuring each new invoice builds on the last while maintaining clear visibility of remaining balances.
• Real-time cash flow visibility: By leveraging online bank feeds and AI-powered insights, RedHammer moved away from retrospective reporting. This allows firm owners to see exactly what cash is on hand and what liabilities are committed before projects drift off track.

The elimination of manual bottlenecks

The transition to Intuit Enterprise Suite has enabled RedHammer to be a true proactive solution partner for their clients. The implementation of the Intuit ERP has resulted in: 

• Accelerated onboarding: By leveraging Intuit Enterprise Suite’s AI, RedHammer can now map charts of accounts across multiple entities automatically, a task that was previously “painful and time-consuming.”
• Reduced manual entry errors: By utilizing dimension assignments, RedHammer anticipates a significant reduction in the percentage of transactions that were historically miscoded by data entry staff.
• Enhanced reporting fidelity: With Intuit Enterprise Suite’s Business Intelligence, Franchini eliminated weeks of manual data auditing. By deploying RedHammer's proprietary report templates across new client files, the firm reduced initial client audit time by 50%, allowing them to deliver strategic insights in days.
• Fraud risk mitigation: The new fund release approval workflow ensures that even after a bill is posted to the GL, money does not move until authorized. This enforces true segregation of duties, separating bill entry from payment approval, a critical control that mid-market construction firms have historically struggled to implement without costly add-on systems.

Becoming a true solution provider for the construction industry

With Intuit Enterprise Suite, RedHammer no longer views the $10M–$30M revenue bracket as a point of client churn. The firm is currently moving its 38 QuickBooks Desktop clients to Intuit Enterprise Suite, viewing it as a game changer for data integrity. As Intuit Enterprise Suite continues to roll out AI-powered forecasting and externalized APIs, RedHammer plans to integrate non-financial data, such as subcontractor compliance and lien waiver status, into custom objects to create the industry's first truly holistic construction dashboard. “We’re living through a defining moment in technology,” Franchini concludes, “Intuit Enterprise Suite doesn't just help our clients keep up, but ensures they don't get run over by the train of progress.”