Contractor Business
Solutions NW
Arcoro Partner Case Study
Construction Accounting Software Vendor Completes Circle with Arcoro Platform
Longtime Sage vendor CBSNW of Pacific Northwest adds Arcoro to solutions portfolio to help fill industry need for HR and compliance support.
Though its first sales under a different name date back to 1986, Contractor Business Solutions NW (CBSNW) was born when two construction software resellers partnered up in 2003. The company now has around 1,200 clients across multiple states, from its home turf of Washington to Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and Hawaii.
For almost two decades, CBSNW exclusively resold Sage construction software products, including Sage 100 and Sage 300. Their client acquisition methods were grassroots and their mission was to help growing construction businesses get their accounting, RFIs and budgeting processes more organized.
CBSNW’s grassroots philosophy and approach has persisted even as they’ve grown. Their thriving client relationships stem from networking at construction-specific associations, publication and Internet research, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth referrals. CBSNW ushers clients through the onboarding and implementation of their new Sage software and beyond.
“Most of our conversations revolve around nuts and bolts like accounting,” said owner Jon Newsom. “But the rewarding part is helping people understand how their business is really doing or where they could be doing better, and helping them improve those processes. I love getting to the end of the marathon and seeing the results.”
What Arcoro brought to the table
The close connections and ongoing relationships CBSNW has with their clients meant they didn’t take adding another software to their solutions portfolio lightly.
Partner Goals
• Help growing construction companies streamline their finances
• Attract clients with carefully curated software solutions and the knowledge to back them up
• Assist existing and new customers with construction-specific HR and wage compliance tools
Partner Results
• A 360-degree solution that spans accounting to HR, payroll and wage compliance
• Deep understanding of the operational benefits of construction HR and compliance support
• Ability to sell to larger companies’ CFOs who “get” impact of compliance on their bottom line
Modules Offered
Time and Attendance
Benefits Management
Applicant Tracking System
Onboarding
Core HR
“From the beginning I really appreciated how organized Arcoro is and their willingness to help us with anything we need.”
So when Newsom first encountered Arcoro, he proceeded with caution. He wasn’t going to consider a product that wouldn’t add real value for their clients. But he could see the gaps in operational support that neither Sage nor any other accounting and finance-focused software was designed to fill—i.e. compliance support for construction hiring regulations as well as federal wage and hour laws.
“I don’t know any accounting system that does a good job of addressing these issues,” Newsom said. “Arcoro seemed very complementary to the offering we already had in place.”
A light went on for Newsom. He realized partnering with Arcoro would provide CBSNW with good reason to not only go back to its existing customer base, but also to tell new prospects that their offering could now complete the circle with strong HR and mobile timekeeping software.
The other clincher: Newsom was impressed by the people at Arcoro. “From the beginning I really appreciated how organized Arcoro is and their willingness to help us with anything we need,” he said.
A theory comes into practice—and works
Newsom was sure that many of the businesses he worked with, and many prospects, had HR needs that needed filling, even if they didn’t realize it. After learning quite a bit about hiring and wage compliance from Arcoro and his own research, he could see the value proposition clearly.
CBSNW closed on a deal on Arcoro within the first three months of the new partnership, and today there are more deals moving through the sales pipeline.
In February, Newsom and his team held an education webinar and made phone calls to many CFOs. “A lot of times people will self-qualify that they need better accounting or estimating system,” Newsom said. “But when we started talking about the financial risk of not having a good HR system, these people get that,” he said.
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