Eric Pratt grew up counting inventory in his family's 100-year-old power tools and machinery business, learning bookkeeping from his grandmother while the rest of his family worked the trades. He spent years selling virtual card and e-payments before joining Viewpoint in 2020, right as they rolled out an e-payments program for Spectrum with barely twenty live customers. Six years later he sits on the Trimble App Exchange team, works closely with fintech partners like EarlyTrade, and calls himself the "AP partner guy."
On this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Eric sits down with Rishi Srivastava to unpack how construction finance teams actually buy software, why peer references beat logic every time, and why he thinks AI — the way most teams are using it today — is quietly creating more work at every stage of the funnel. He walks through what App Exchange is really solving as ERPs like Vista and Spectrum evolve, where economy of scale breaks an integration, and why AP managers, not CFOs, are often the ones doing the real selling upward. He tells the story of a COVID-era CFO whose owner leased an industrial printer for her living room so checks could keep flowing, uses it to explain why every "we've always done it this way" objection deserves curiosity rather than judgment, and closes on why reverse-prompting your own Drive to find the bottlenecks is more useful than another chatbot.
Topics include:

• What Trimble App Exchange is really solving as ERPs evolve
• Why trust signals — peer references, CFMA presence, live customers you can text mid-demo — beat logic in construction sales
• Vista vs Spectrum: two ERPs, two very different customer personas
• What breaks first when an integration scales from 10 to 400 customers
• Why AP managers, not CFOs, are often the real champions — and how to arm them to sell upward
• "Living in the white space": reading what isn't being said in a status-quo objection
• Which manual back-office behaviors are actually optional now, even if they don't feel like it
• The COVID-era CFO who printed checks from her living room — and why accommodation beats judgment
• EarlyTrade, dynamic discounting, and why it isn't factoring
• The AI paradox: why the tools we're using today are creating more mental work at every stage of the funnel

Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Beiing Human, AI-powered accounts payable automation for construction contractors.

Brandon Kyse started as a framer at fifteen, studied construction management at Cal Poly, spent seven years in solar, and then thirteen years at RDO Equipment — one of the largest John Deere dealers in the world — running divisions up to $400 million. On this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, he sits down with Rishi Srivastava to unpack what he learned from the dealer seat and what it means for the contractors he now works with.

Brandon walks through the P&L of a $400 million dealership and explains why the biggest revenue line carries the thinnest margin, why service is where the money is made, and how cutting one service manager can improve the numbers on paper while quietly wrecking the customer experience. He tells the story of an $80,000 engine that telematics flagged a week before it failed — and why the real breakdown was about ownership and communication, not the technology. He also revisits the Sungevity moment of 2009, when a competitor selling solar off Google Maps aerials proved everyone in the market wrong about how customers had to buy, and draws a straight line to how construction and equipment companies are operating today.

Topics include:

• What contractors actually want from dealers (and what dealers keep missing)
• Why companies outgrow their operating systems long before they outgrow their technology
• The hidden cost of good people compensating for broken handoffs
• Who your best customer really is — hint: not the biggest
• Capturing thirty years of technician knowledge before it walks out the door
• What to change Monday morning if you have telematics and nobody owns the alerts
• Why "bring AI into the company" is not an operating objective
• Advice for contractors mid-ERP implementation: don't blow it up, cut the timeline in half
• How to move a "we've done it this way for forty years" culture — put a cost on the status quo

Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Beiing Human, AI-powered accounts payable automation for construction contractors.

Caryl Coronis, CPA, CCIFP, has served CFMA at every level — Houston chapter president, co-founder of the resurrected Lone Star Conference, and most recently national chair. But her construction finance career started with a surety agent telling her, "You're going to have to do percent complete," and an invitation to a chapter meeting.

In this episode, Caryl joins Rishi Srivastava to talk about what a commercial landscape company taught her about equipment: when one riding mower goes down, four people with push mowers finish the job, and that labor is where the money quietly leaves. Those fundamentals scaled all the way up to cranes at a specialty bridge builder, where shaving one or two points off equipment cost meant real dollars in a thin-margin business.

She also shares how three chapter presidents brought back a regional conference that had died at 15 attendees and grew it to roughly 300 — and why sponsors willing to risk their money made it possible. Then the conversation gets candid: navigating owner politics from the finance seat, the family business where Friday decisions got reversed after Sunday dinner, the son who bought a two-seat sports car on the company's dime, and the quiet way tasks stop getting done when one person leaves and nobody plans the handoff.

We also cover the CCIFP exam at regional conferences (with a free retake), why the certification still matters when AI models can pass it, the CFMA heavy equipment comparator (hecomparator.com), and Caryl's pitch for why the regionals — at half the cost of national — are the best first step for anyone in year one.

Topics covered:

• Percentage of completion accounting and how CFMA fills the training gap
• The real cost of equipment downtime and the repair-vs-replace decision
• Rebuilding the CFMA Lone Star Conference from 15 to 300 attendees
• Offering the CCIFP exam at regional conferences
• Keeping the CCIFP relevant in the age of AI
• Owner politics, family businesses, and being the outsider in the room
• Why handoffs fail and how job descriptions, task lists, and software training fix it
• "Yes, it integrates" — the ERP bolt-on reality
• How to get involved with CFMA at any level

Resources mentioned: CFMA Connection Cafe, hecomparator.com, cfma.org (search "regional conferences")

Beiing Human will be at the CFMA Carolinas Conference in Greensboro, October 22–23. Stop by the booth.

Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, founder of Beiing Human. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Audible, or watch on YouTube.