Schippers Construction scales from 120 to 160 projects with Intuit Enterprise Suite

Custom builder scales its project load on real-time data

Schippers Construction is a custom home builder and general contractor in Holland, Michigan, that had run on QuickBooks Online since its earliest days. As the 15-year-old firm grew into multiple entities, a wider range of project types, and a heavier project load, leadership found the system could no longer surface the real-time project and cross-entity data they needed to run the business. After moving to Intuit Enterprise Suite, Schippers is on track to manage 160 projects this year, up from 120, a jump Director of Finance and Strategy Lena Stob says would not have been possible on their old setup.

Reporting lagged budgets until overruns were locked in

Schippers had used QuickBooks Online since it was a three-person company, and the platform worked well at that scale. As the firm grew to roughly 25 people running projects that ranged from single-day service calls to multi-million-dollar custom homes, the complexity outgrew the system. Most of the company's work runs on cost-plus contracts, where clients are billed for actual project costs plus a management fee, which makes constant, accurate cost tracking essential rather than optional. With as many as 30 projects active at once and labor rates that change by role, by project, and by year, the finance team needed to see job performance clearly, but could not.

The deeper cost was timing. A decade ago, Stob was running manual reports to track every project, pulling labor separately from expenses and merging the two by hand in Excel before she could see where a job stood. By the time the numbers came together, a framing crew running high on labor might already be weeks past the point where anything could be done. Project managers leaned on instinct, reasoning that a gain in one category would offset an overage in another, an assumption Stob notes “is not how it really ever plays out.” Without real-time visibility, those gaps surfaced late, as eroded margin and an avoidable surprise for a client who had expected none.

A tech stack with Intuit Enterprise Suite as the brain

The team had begun evaluating other platforms, looking hard at Sage along with construction-specific systems including Procore, Jonas, and Premier. The decision coincided with a major restructuring after a partnership split, a period when leadership was being deliberate about which tools were worth keeping.

With the introduction to Intuit Enterprise Suite, Schippers found the capability set they had been missing. Leadership concluded that no single platform would do everything a builder spanning service work and custom homes needs, so the team built a best-in-class stack with Intuit Enterprise Suite at the center. As Stob describes it, “The Intuit ERP has become like our brain, and then all of those different softwares are the different body parts, with the brain holding everything together and the systems talking back and forth.” Intuit Enterprise Suite earned that central role by allowing Stob to run a layer of reporting and customization she could not produce elsewhere, and pair it with responsive support that adapted as the company's needs changed.

More projects with real-time budgets

Today, Schippers is on track to run 160 projects this year, up from 120, and Stob is direct that the company “could not be doing that right now” without the ability to manage projects inside Intuit Enterprise Suite and keep each one moving. The same project-level discipline shows up in the financials, where the firm grew net revenue 7% over the past year.

What changed day to day is visibility. Where Stob once ran reports and stitched labor into expenses by hand, she now opens Intuit Enterprise Suite to KPIs that populate on a single screen, with budgets versus actuals broken out by project manager and labor data feeding in from the company's connected systems. She describes having that view in one place as “literally a game changer,” because it lets her catch a yellow flag early and bring the team together to fix a project before it slips underwater rather than after. That same speed reaches the field through the company's Buildertrend integration, which syncs daily job logs and photos so Stob can reconcile a confusing budget against what actually happened on site instead of chasing project managers first thing in the morning.

The AI-native ERP has also taken over many manual tasks. During Michigan's busy summer months, the team is flooded with bills, and Intuit Enterprise Suite now reads and codes those bills and routes approvals to project managers in the field, so trade partners get paid faster even when a manager can't make it back to the office. “Getting them invoiced and paid quickly, with payroll and HR handled in the same platform, is something we really value,” says Stob. The result is fewer surprises during peak season and a better client experience.

Forward-looking AI and continued growth

Stob, who came from a Communications and IT background and pushes her team to adopt new tools, sees the Intuit Enterprise Suite AI agents as the next step for an industry facing ever-heavier documentation demands, from CAD-only permits to plan sets that have grown from ten pages to a hundred. Her focus now is getting as much clean data into the platform as possible so that intelligence can help the team forecast and plan, and she intends to keep building on Intuit Enterprise Suite as both the company and the product grow.

Read more about how businesses like Schippers Construction use Intuit Enterprise Suite to help them grow.

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