How Gerloff Contracting Won Back 10 Hours a Week with Agave
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About Gerloff Contracting
Gerloff Contracting is a commercial drywall contractor founded in 2020 and based in Raleigh, North Carolina. It is part of a small family of specialty trade businesses alongside E. Caligari & Son, a commercial painting company founded in 1896 in Norfolk, Virginia. A team from the Caligari side came south to launch the Raleigh operation, and both companies have grown steadily over the last five to six years.
That growth showed up first in the back office. Gerloff runs on Procore for project management and Foundation for accounting, and the volume moving between those two systems eventually outpaced the process holding them together.
The Problem: An AP Workflow Running Backwards
Roughly 250 vendor invoices arrived every week, all of them by email, and all of them keyed in by hand. Christina Mooneyham, Project Accountant, entered every one. Invoices tied to purchase orders had to be entered a second time into Procore so the field could track payment against them, which meant the same document touched twice before anyone in operations ever saw it.
One vendor made the math worse. That vendor submitted five to a dozen invoices as a single PDF attachment, and each one had to be separated by hand and entered individually before it could be matched to a PO. A single attachment could take well over five minutes just to break apart.
The deeper problem was sequencing. Invoices were coded and entered in Foundation before project managers ever reviewed them, which meant the people who actually knew the jobs were reviewing costs that had already landed.
The consequences were predictable. Gerloff frequently runs multiple jobs inside the same building, so an invoice could name one job and belong to another. Christina coded to her best judgment, and errors surfaced later, usually when a cost report came out a week behind. Fixing them meant moving costs around in Foundation, trading emails and phone calls with PMs, and sometimes never catching the error at all.
The strain peaked monthly. Christina also handles AR billings for the Caligari side, and billing week runs from roughly the 15th through the 22nd. Billing in the morning, AP entry in the afternoon, and the constant sense of being behind.
Choosing Agave
Gerloff had already tried Procore's own connector, and it fell short on exactly the workflows the team needed most: eliminating manual invoice entry, handling POs properly, and pushing data back into Procore where the field lives. In Christina's assessment, it simply did not have the same capability.
Leadership brought the search to Christina because she owned the AP side and the PO tracking, and asked her to help lead the rollout. She had already researched the product and seen the demo. Some nerves came with taking on something new, but the direction was obvious. "Absolutely, sign me up," she said. "I knew the end result."
Implementation
Implementation ran on a weekly cadence, with a shared portal that laid out what each session would cover, supporting videos, and step-by-step documentation available in the product itself. Christina still points to that in-app documentation as something she uses today: click into AP invoices, open the docs, and get the walkthrough without filing a ticket.
Just as important, the relationship did not end at go-live. The team continues to bring suggestions forward and see them turn into product changes, including recent work that eliminated a manual data import step in Foundation.
The Impact
10+ hours a week, back
Christina now processes the same Gerloff invoice volume in a fraction of the time, with roughly 85 percent of invoices flowing through Agave. Multi-invoice PDFs are split automatically. Nothing gets keyed twice.
Cost coding fixed before it hits the books
Invoices now reach project managers before payment. On large jobs broken out by building or floor, with cost codes assigned per floor, a non-PO invoice no longer requires Christina to guess. She codes her best estimate, sends it over, and the PM selects the right floor. No email chains, no phone calls, no cost report surprises a week later.
Permissions keep that review clean. Christina controls what PMs can see and change, so the review step catches coding errors without opening the door to incorrect approvals.
Real dollars, not just hours
Pre-payment review catches more than cost codes. PMs now spot vendor pricing errors while there is still leverage to do something about it, so credits get requested faster and costs stop landing on the wrong job.
One less system
Gerloff is fully off its previous Procore connector, consolidating ERP sync and AP automation onto a single platform.
Looking Ahead
Caligari is next. The painting company still enters invoices manually, and bringing it onto AP automation will hand another team member the same hours back that Christina recovered. Beyond that, Christina is already scoping labor and payroll as the next workflow worth automating, and she has been careful to keep labor invoices in scope so the data is ready when that day comes.
