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.

Most contractors will tell you they run at 25%, 30%, even 40% gross margin. Almost none of them are right.

In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, host Rishi Srivastava sits down with Luke Boyenger — former EY auditor turned fractional CFO, running a firm built specifically for construction companies. Luke's family manufacturing business went bankrupt in the 2008 crisis, and the question "what did we get wrong?" sent him back to school at 24. What he found is the same gap he sees in nearly every contractor he talks to today: the finance seat is the last one to get filled.

The uncomfortable thesis: revenue in construction doesn't create cash, it consumes it. Luke walks through why some contractors need to cut their business in half to double their profit, why a line of credit and your own cash is a fragile capital structure, why merchant cash advances trap good companies in a spiral, and why "revenue is something you should back your way into" after you've set a profit target.

What we get into:

• Why gross margin is almost always lower than owners think
• $20M at $250K profit vs. $10M at $1M profit — real contractors who shrank and made more money
• 60–120 day payment terms and why subcontractors are functioning as unpaid banks
• What "capital infrastructure" actually means for a $10–30M subcontractor
• The war chest: building 6–12 months of cash before you take distributions
• The five KPIs every construction owner should review monthly
• Why owners who know what to do still don't do it
• Keeping business and personal finances clean — and why stacked entities and trusts usually backfire

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:00 From the trades to EY to fractional CFO
02:56 Where contractors are most confidently wrong
04:46 Profitability vs. "happy revenue"
06:44 Warning signs you're growing revenue at the expense of profit
09:00 Shrinking from $20M to $10M and making more money
10:21 Cash flow and capital infrastructure
14:10 MCAs, predatory lending, and 120% effective rates
15:09 Smarter capital tools before you're under pressure
17:20 Subcontractors as the industry's real banks
18:10 Operator vs. owner mindset
21:00 Managing by financial signals instead of gut feel
23:35 Why execution is so hard in construction finance
25:38 Weekly, monthly, and quarterly financial disciplines
26:35 Invoice terms, late-paying GCs, and how to bid for them
29:45 The biggest mistakes limiting $10–50M subcontractors
33:40 Separating business and personal finances
37:25 One uncomfortable financial truth for construction owners

Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, founder of Beiing Human. New episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and YouTube — just search Finance at the Jobsite.

What actually tells you whether a construction company is healthy?

For Josh Bohlke, CFO of Columbia River Electric Maintenance, the answer goes far beyond the P&L.

After moving from commercial banking into the CFO seat at a $30–40 million electrical contractor, Josh saw firsthand how different construction finance looks from inside the business. In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, we dig into WIP, backlog, gross profit, job costing, working capital, ERP data quality, automation, and the changing role of the construction CFO.

Josh explains why WIP is more art than science, why contractors need to understand their balance sheet, and how bad ERP data—from stale POs to unclosed jobs—can quietly distort decision-making.

We also discuss:

• Why backlog and gross profit are two of the most important construction KPIs
• How labor hours, installed quantities, and cost should be used together to evaluate job performance
• Why analyzing the business entirely through the P&L can be dangerous
• When it may be worth reconverting or cleaning up your construction ERP
• Lessons from rebuilding a Spectrum ERP environment
• Why clean data can help identify job fade weeks instead of months later
• Where automation works well in construction—and where human judgment is still critical
• The opportunity to automate AP, credit-card coding, and vendor statement reconciliation
• Procore, Spectrum, integrations, and the reality of “software fatigue”
• Why building your own software with AI may work for small workflows but create security and maintenance risks for mission-critical systems
• How AI could shift finance teams away from building spreadsheets and dashboards toward interpreting data and making strategic decisions
• Why the CFO's job requires not only financial expertise, but tact when delivering difficult messages to ownership

A practical conversation about what it really takes to run the finance function inside a growing construction company—and how that job may change as AI becomes part of the back office.

#ConstructionFinance #ConstructionCFO #ConstructionAccounting #JobCosting #WIP #ConstructionTechnology #ConstructionERP #APAutomation #ArtificialIntelligence #ConstructionAI #Procore #ViewpointSpectrum #CashFlow #WorkingCapital #FinanceLeadership #ElectricalContractor #FinanceAtTheJobsite

Matt Hunter, CPA didn't take a straight line into construction finance. He was out on his own at 16, sitting in a classroom at North Georgia Military College when the second plane hit on 9/11, and deployed to Afghanistan within weeks. Twenty-one years later he retired as an Army major in military intelligence — and only came to accounting in his thirties.

In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Rishi and Matt get into the parts of the CFO seat most people won't say out loud.

What we cover:

• Digging out of ~$1.2M in unpaid payroll tax at a packaging company — the cash-out refi, getting the IRS to abate roughly $400K in penalties, and losing a banking relationship over a tax lien mid-COVID
• Cleaning up 36 months of financials at a copier business and adding close to $1M to the sale price
• The first things Matt checks when he inherits broken books (hint: it starts with the balance sheet, not the P&L)
• What it actually takes to stand up a finance function from scratch — and why the best money an owner can spend is on the best bookkeeper they can find
• Owners who have never once logged into their ERP, and the 20,000 inventory items that should have been 1,000
• The politics of family-owned construction: supervising the owner's spouse, intercompany billings in Vista, and why the hardest part of these jobs is rarely the numbers
• Finding out he was being replaced from an email to a recruiter he was accidentally copied on — two months after a glowing review
• Mental health, bravado, and job loss in construction and the military — told honestly, without the polish
• Earning credibility in ego-heavy rooms: know your numbers, get out of the office, and take care of people
• Red flags and the questions to ask before you sign with a founder-led construction company

Matt is currently looking for his next CFO role in commercial construction or manufacturing, open to relocating within a half day's drive of Atlanta. If you're hiring — or know someone who is — reach him at mrhcpa1706@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.

Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava and brought to you by Beiing Human.

#FinanceAtTheJobsite #ConstructionFinance #ConstructionAccounting #CFO #ConstructionCFO #CPA #FamilyBusiness #JobCosting #ERP #Vista #ViewpointVista #ConstructionIndustry #Leadership #VeteranLeadership #MentalHealthInConstruction #APAutomation #Controller #ConstructionManagement #BeiingHuman

Construction companies don't blink at a $500,000 backhoe. They agonize over a $50,000 software line item. Kris Lengieza, Field COO at Procore Technologies, thinks that mental model is about to break — and that the shift starts when CFOs stop treating AI agents as IT spend and start treating them as labor.

Rishi and Kris get into the CFO conversation that made it click: "I trust my PMs to hire day laborers out of their project budget. Why shouldn't they have the same autonomy to fund AI agents?"

In this episode:

• Why the construction CFO role is shifting from bookkeeping to capital deployment, IT, and M&A
• Automation vs. augmentation — and what each actually means for a mid-size GC
• The productivity math: 35% of a field day spent on low-value work, 20% just hunting for answers
• Agents across systems, not just inside one — ERP, SharePoint, Procore, and 150+ connectors
• Cost control and guardrails: how one agent run turned into a $700 bill, and why "hardened" agents matter
• Whether AI spend belongs in project cost or the IT budget (and why construction's 1–2% tech spend is misleading)
• Robots as tools vs. full autonomy — Dusty Robotics, DroneDeploy, Bedrock Robotics, and what 2031 looks like
• The "Trish" story: a project admin whose role was elevated, not eliminated
• Why 76% of digital transformations fail, and how to survive an ERP migration
• What makes a construction tech startup defensible in the SaaSpocalypse: proprietary data and deep domain expertise
• Kris's 2030 prediction: the same number of humans, one project engineer, and a hundred agents

Kris spent 20 years in the field — Whiting-Turner, Weitz, Stiles — before moving to Procore, where he's led global partnerships, technology evangelism, and now the Field COO role. Lehigh civil engineering grad, LEED AP, ENR Southeast Top 20 Under 40.

"The agents aren't coming. They're here."

#ConstructionFinance #ConstructionTech #AIinConstruction #CFO #Procore #ConstructionManagement #AIAgents #DigitalTransformation #ConstructionIndustry #FinanceAtTheJobsite #ConstructionRobotics #ConstructionAccounting #FutureOfWork #ContechPodcast #BuiltEnvironment

Every contractor says they're best in class — but until you put your numbers on paper, you haven't proven it. In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Rishi sits down with Arleen Barningham, Product & Data Analytics Manager at CFMA, and Rhett Ennis, CPA, Shareholder at CBIZ CPAs and Pacific Northwest Construction Practice Group Leader, to break down CFMA's Financial Benchmarker — the tool that lets construction companies see how they really stack up against their peers.

We get into what the benchmarker is and the question it was built to answer 30 years ago, why contractors are so often surprised the first time they see their "report card," and how to choose a fair peer group. Rhett shares the metrics he finds most diagnostic (working capital, equity, AR turnover, and the underrated gross profit per FTE), which widely watched ratios get misread most often, and why the real breakthrough happens when owners see their results visually instead of in raw numbers. Arleen walks through the data-collection grind — why a survey can take a CPA four to five hours — and the modernization push to pull data straight from ERP systems via API, plus how CFMA protects the confidentiality of sensitive financials.

Whether you're a CFO, controller, or contractor who's never benchmarked before, this one is a challenge to stop guessing and start proving it.

📩 Never miss an episode — join 500+ construction finance and ops leaders getting practical insights in their inbox: https://beiinghuman.com/newsletter-signup/

#Construction #ConstructionFinance #CFMA #Benchmarking #JobCosting #WorkingCapital #CFO #Contractors #ConstructionAccounting #ConstructionTech #FinanceAtTheJobsite #ConstructionManagement