How American Flooring Services Got Proactive with Agave AI Analytics and Expense Management

About American Flooring Services

For more than 20 years, American Flooring Services has installed flooring on multifamily, student housing, senior living, hospitality, and commercial projects across the country. Headquartered in Hiram, Georgia, the specialty contractor has served more than 150 clients and provided over 100 million square feet of flooring, with projects ranging from roughly $200K to $6 million.

Alex Olvera runs the company's finances as Controller. His scope covers surety and bonding, insurance, financial reporting, and subcontractor management, along with a heavy hand in operations through monthly WIP meetings, job scheduling, and forecasting.

The Challenge

A year ago, American Flooring Services ran its books in QuickBooks. Month-end close meant confirming that everything had been transacted, but there was little ability to analyze performance by project. Retainage and other construction-specific items were difficult to track, so the company moved to Sage Intacct.

Better accounting software solved part of the problem, but the WIP review process was still heavily manual. With a full slate of active projects across the PM team, Alex met with every project manager each month to walk through upcoming change orders, unforeseen costs, and forecasts. The stakes were high: if a significant unsigned change order slipped through, ownership would often spot it before finance did.

Collections were another pressure point. Payments were typically due 45 days after billing, but late payers stretched days sales outstanding to around 80 days, even as the company paid W-2 payroll, subcontractors, and material vendors every Friday.

Expense management added its own drag. Foremen and superintendents on jobsites nationwide generate 600 to 1,000 card transactions a month, each of which must be coded to the right project. With similarly named projects and multiple phases, miscoding was a constant risk, and the work took a team member two to three days every month.

Choosing Agave

Alex first connected with Agave while evaluating Procore. When the company decided not to move forward with Procore, the Agave team followed up and pointed out that, as a Sage Intacct customer, American Flooring Services could still benefit from Agave. The timing was right: Alex was already experimenting with AI tools to speed up reporting.

What stood out was Agave's willingness to build around American Flooring Services' needs. After meeting the Agave team again at a CFMA conference in Chattanooga, Alex shared an idea for giving finance better visibility into the project updates ownership was hearing about first. Agave built it, even though it was not an existing offering. Alex also noted a key difference from competing tools that live inside Sage or the PM software:

The Impact

WIP reviews cut in half with AI Analytics

Agave AI Analytics now surfaces the details leadership cares about before Alex walks into a PM meeting, such as a project that has incurred $100K in expense against only $50K billed.

By Alex's conservative estimate, Agave has cut the time he spends with PMs on WIP review in half, saving roughly 25 hours every month.

Faster collections, with a paper trail

Alex built an automated AR report in Agave that categorizes every receivable by standing and emails it to him and the company's AR lead. It flags accounts that need a follow-up email, then escalates to demand letters that populate a template for the company's attorney, then to lien filings. On late-paying accounts, Alex estimates days sales outstanding (DSO) have dropped by about 20 days.

Expense coding in hours, not days

With AI reading receipts (including photos of a gas pump when a receipt goes missing) and a human approval step, the monthly review now takes about three hours instead of 16. Alex puts accuracy at 98 to 99%, with the rare error traced to an employee choosing the wrong project phase.

The team member who used to spend days on card coding and manual purchase order entry now drafts subcontracts and works directly with project managers, a role the company needed.

Operational reports ownership actually uses

Alex has built 15 to 30 vetted reports in plain language and refreshes most of them weekly. They include PM workload by status and backlog, subcontractor capacity by geography to guide awards, a nationwide project map for placing crew lodging, bonded project status using his own custom Sage smart rules, projects missing a schedule of values, and deposit tracking by bank account. During the QuickBooks migration, he also used Agave to audit every active and completed project for duplicated entries and unapplied payments, tying results back to the general ledger.

Looking Ahead

American Flooring Services is still finishing its systems overhaul and expects the full payoff to arrive in 2027. The team plans to explore more of Agave's automation, including AP Automation and custom AI Agents that will take repetitive work off the team's plate.