How Copper Hammer Roofing stopped chasing its crew for receipts and gave its bookkeeper hours back every week.

Copper Hammer Roofing is the premier roofing company in the beautiful ski resort town of Park City, Utah. They put standing seam metal and shingle roofs on mountain homes, including new construction.

The company has four people on the team and also tracks expenses for the subcontractors it works with. Every receipt and bill belongs to a job, and most of the people spending the money are rarely in the office.

Their days are spent out on jobs, which is where the buying happens and where the emails about that buying arrive.

Much of the paperwork already arrived by email. Plenty of receipts came from Home Depot, and suppliers emailed their bills. The problem was where they landed: spread across several people's inboxes.

So a large part of her job was asking people to forward what had come in, and every request depended on someone remembering to do it.

Every so often she would log in to QuickBooks and enter the backlog herself. Until then, the books were only as current as the last round of forwarding, and a receipt still sitting in someone's inbox was simply missing.

The reminders were hard on both sides. Nobody likes being reminded again and again in the middle of a job.

Now, when a receipt or bill lands in anyone's inbox, it shows up in QuickBooks on its own. Nobody has to forward it.

Since June 1, documents have come in from three of the team's inboxes, about 16 a week, and 288 of the 291 arrived by email.

The team did not have to change how they buy or who they buy from. Home Depot and suppliers still email the same inboxes as before, and the receipts that used to sit in different people's email now reach the books from wherever they land.

She no longer enters everything herself or asks everyone for everything. Her time goes to looking over what has come in, with no backlog waiting for the next catch-up session.

She says the team is happier too. There is less friction, because the steady stream of reminders has slowed down.

For people who are rarely in the office, a message asking for a receipt usually arrives at a bad moment. Each one is small, but they add up on both ends.

Now she spends less of her week chasing, and the team spends less of theirs being chased.

Some purchases still come with a paper receipt. It helped so much that the team started writing their project numbers on paper receipts, so the system could process those too.

A project number ties a purchase to the job it was for, which is exactly what the books need when spending comes from the team and its subcontractors. The people in the field changed how they handle paper so those receipts could follow the same path as the emailed ones.

For the business, this is a big one. Bills and receipts now reach QuickBooks as they come in, so the books stay current.

That means they can see what each project is costing, and how profitable it is, while the job is still going. Before, that picture had to wait for the next catch-up session.

QuickBooks shows the numbers. DocStreamAI keeps QuickBooks fed.

She reports getting 2 to 3 hours a week back, time she used to spend entering bills and expenses and asking for the documents behind them.

From June 1 to October 5, that is an estimated 36 to 54 hours. It asked very little of the team: their receipts and bills keep arriving where they always did, plus one new habit they picked up because it helped.

The hours are an estimate from her own 2 to 3 hours a week. The document counts come from DocStreamAI's records for Copper Hammer Roofing.