A mid-market GC tackling complex work across the Eastern U.S.

Cleveland Construction is a commercial contractor with general contracting and interior trades operations stretching from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C., Orlando, and Charlotte. They’ve built a reputation for taking on some of the most complex projects across the Eastern U.S. — from restoring century-old landmarks to delivering $80M outlet malls in under 12 months.

Their portfolio speaks for itself: more than twenty historic adaptive reuse projects in downtown Cleveland, including Terminal Tower and the Schofield Building; large-scale retail developments for Simon Properties; and infrastructure work spanning airport terminals and defense facilities.

With dozens of active jobs running at once, Cleveland’s accounting and operations teams rely on real-time financial data to deliver projects within budget and on schedule.

The challenge

Before Agave, Cleveland depended on a legacy integration provider to connect their PM system and Sage 300 CRE. When it worked, it worked — but when it didn’t, the impact affected the entire business.

Project Managers found themselves locked out of WIPs during critical month-start reporting, invoices and purchase orders wouldn’t get pushed from the PM system to Sage, and vendor payments slipped through the cracks, straining relationships and jeopardizing work.Instead of unlocking growth, Cleveland’s connector became a bottleneck:

“When there was a problem, it always seemed to hit during the first week of the month. Everything would stop. PMs couldn’t run WIPs, POs didn’t push, invoices didn’t get paid. It became a real issue.”

Elliot Christiansen

SVP of Operations

The turning point

When Cleveland made the decision to move from a previous PM system to Autodesk Build, they saw an opportunity to rethink their integration strategy. Their implementation partner, IMAGINiT, recommended Agave. From the very beginning, the difference was obvious.

“Agave let us choose where jobs originate. We can start in Autodesk for precon—RFIs, meeting minutes, drawings—and only push to Sage once the contract is signed. We keep all the history without clogging the ERP. That flexibility changed how we start and manage jobs.”

Elliot Christiansen

SVP of Operations

With Agave, Cleveland gained flexibility they didn’t have with their legacy connector.

They could now originate projects directly in Autodesk Build during preconstruction — tracking RFIs, meeting minutes, and drawings — and only push them into Sage once contracts were signed. That change helped keep their ERP organized while preserving the complete history of every job in their PM system. Other details, like translating different numbering systems between estimating and operations, were handled seamlessly through Agave’s Value Mapper tool, which enables mappings between business-specific custom fields.Just as important was the visibility Agave brought.

Instead of treating sync errors like black boxes, Agave showed exactly what failed and how to fix it. For the first time, Cleveland’s IT and accounting teams had clear visibility into what was happening behind the scenes, and could easily understand it in plain english due to Agave’s error-message translation layer. And when issues did arise, the support experience was night and day — real engineers who understood Cleveland’s exact setup, available over Microsoft Teams or on weekly calls, resolving problems live rather than handing off tickets into a weeks-long queue.

Implementation

Cleveland chose to move fast. Instead of waiting for Autodesk Build to be fully configured, they rolled out Agave concurrently — an aggressive cutover that surfaced configuration challenges early but paid off in spades.

Agave’s transparently designed system made it simple to see exactly how fields and data mapped between systems, and small tweaks that once required backend development could now be made instantly by their IT team in Agave’s user interface.The Agave and Cleveland teams met weekly for thirty minutes, solving open issues live on each call. Even nuanced problems — like Autodesk’s subcontract CO numbering scheme — were resolved on the fly by parsing strings into Sage-friendly formats using Agave’s Value Mapper.

What stood out most to Cleveland was how the Agave team operated. They weren’t a vendor on the other side of a ticketing system — they felt like an extension of Cleveland’s own IT, operations, and accounting teams, configuring a software platform to meet the exact needs of their business.

Results

Today, Cleveland’s month-start reporting looks completely different. Instead of stalled WIPs and delayed invoices, their accounting and project management teams work off a single, reliable source of truth.

Errors that once took days to track down are now flagged clearly and resolved in minutes. The accounting team has full confidence that the data in Sage reflects what’s happening in Autodesk Build. Project Managers no longer have to pause their workflows to chase down missing entries in a complicated ERP system, and IT has reclaimed dozens of hours each month that were previously lost to troubleshooting obscure issues.

Agave didn’t just replace a broken integration. Agave rebuilt the connection between field operations and accounting — and instilled new confidence in every number that moves between them.