Calculated payroll savings
Approximately $71,017 tracked by July 8, 2026, based on the reduction from the pre-rollout variance-cost baseline multiplied by shifts since rollout.
Case study · National crane company
Payroll savings.
A clearer view of operations.
From conflicting records and overloaded reporting to a shared data foundation—and practical tools for managing time, margins, pricing, and customer renewals.
Inspection renewal rate
Stephanie reports renewal rates improved from approximately 68% in prior years into the high 70s after the dashboard was introduced, alongside focused outreach by a dedicated internal sales team.
See where margins slipped.
Budget-to-actual reporting traced margin losses to labor, materials, and other costs—supporting job reviews and team training.
Turn pricing gaps into action.
Compared quoted rates and markups with pricing standards, giving managers evidence for coaching, approval rules, and budgets.
Spot stalled work and missed handoffs.
Made opportunity age and stage visible, and flagged won work missing a job number in the financial system.
A shared foundation for decisions.
Reconciled conflicting records, removed duplicates, and moved reporting to a dedicated layer over the data lake, keeping queries away from production systems.
The challenge
Teams entered the same data in multiple systems. Records conflicted, duplicates accumulated, and leadership lacked a dependable, consolidated view of the business. Reporting dashboards queried production servers directly, adding load to operational systems.
The engagement initially included integrating customer and financial systems with a proposed field service management application. After roughly six months of integration work and gap analysis, that replacement initiative was canceled as the scope expanded and the proposed application could not meet the business needs. The reporting and data work described here was delivered despite that canceled rollout.
What I built: a reliable data foundation
I built the reporting data foundation and handled the transformations, working with the team to copy core database tables into the reporting environment and keep them synchronized. Bringing records together allowed conflicting information to be reconciled, duplicates to be eliminated, and source-system records to be cleaned up.
I moved reporting to the data lake through a dedicated semantic layer—a reporting model that organizes the data and defines business measures. Reports queried that layer instead of the production systems. I also retired unused reports, standardized refresh schedules, and optimized queries.
Customer, financial, Geotab & payroll data
Reconciled data lake
Dedicated reporting layer
Operational decisions & follow-up
What changed for managers
Connected reporting and analysis, built around decisions managers needed to make.
Technician time reconciliation
Combined Geotab vehicle activity with payroll records to flag and quantify discrepancies by technician and branch. Managers could explain legitimate differences directly from the dashboard and submit them for regional review. Regional managers received next-morning notifications and could approve or reject explanations; approved disputes cleared the flagged variance.
So managers could
Review unexplained time fairly and track calculated savings.
Job profitability and margin fade
Compared budgeted and actual margins to show which jobs lost profitability and whether the differences came from labor, materials, or other costs. Leaders could drill into a job’s transaction history and use the findings in postmortems and team training.
So managers could
Run job postmortems and train teams using transaction-level evidence.
Sales performance and pipeline health
Brought quotes, bookings, win rates, margins, and closing speed into view across branches, salespeople, and job types. Pipeline reporting showed opportunity stage and age, while an exception report flagged won opportunities without a job number in the financial system.
So managers could
Review sales performance, stalled opportunities, and incomplete handoffs.
Pricing governance
Compared quoted labor rates, material markups, and trip charges with published pricing standards. It exposed gaps by branch and estimator, including high-volume, low-margin selling. Managers used the findings to coach salespeople, introduce approval rules, and set budgets.
So managers could
Coach salespeople, introduce approval rules, and set budgets.
Inspection renewals and winback
Built a renewal dashboard for a dedicated internal sales team. It surfaced customers a quarter before renewal, tracked renewal status and missing CRM activity, and identified older lost customers for winback outreach. Managers assigned follow-up actions from this work queue.
So managers could
Assign renewal follow-up and identify winback opportunities.
Analysis beyond the dashboard
Produced leadership reports that distinguished customers who declined a renewal quote from those who never received one. The analysis connected inspections with downstream repair, parts, and modernization revenue, helping prioritize follow-up by the broader value of each relationship.
So managers could
Prioritize outreach by the broader value of each customer relationship.
About the results
Time reconciliation supported fairer tracking of unexplained time and calculated savings. Vehicle movement was a review signal, not proof that someone was not working.
Results reflect Stephanie’s account of the engagement and supplied reporting. Payroll savings are a baseline-based calculation, not an independently audited cash-recovery figure.
The dashboards supported decisions and follow-up by the client’s managers and sales team; the improvements were not the work of software alone.