How Cahill Construction Saved 64+ Hours a Month by Automating AP with MakersHub
About Cahill Construction
Founded in 1996, Cahill Construction is a family-owned, multi-million dollar construction company specializing in retail, restaurant, grocery, and multi-family renovation projects. With over 1,200 completed projects across North America, Cahill manages millions of dollars in project costs each year—working with thousands of vendors and subcontractors to deliver high-quality results for major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Kroger, and Tim Hortons.
The Challenge
Managing hundreds of bills and credit card transactions each month, Cahill’s AP process had become a major operational bottleneck. Their small finance team spent six full days per month entering bills, tracking down approvals, and manually coding costs into QuickBooks.
Despite building their own Smartsheet-based system to manage approvals, the process still required extensive double data entry and lacked the granularity needed to analyze project costs in detail. Credit card reconciliation alone took over four days every month, creating further delays in financial reporting.
Trey Cahill, President of Cahill Construction, had evaluated countless software solutions but struggled to find one his team would actually use—until they discovered MakersHub.
“We built our own AP system from the ground up, but MakersHub is infinitely better.”
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Trey Cahill
President, Cahill Construction
The MakersHub Solution
Cahill transitioned its entire AP process—bills, receipts, and approvals—to MakersHub. The platform’s Smart Data Capture and real-time QuickBooks integration eliminated double entry, automated line-item extraction, and created a centralized hub for approvals and collaboration.
With MakersHub, Cahill’s team can:
- Automatically capture line-item details, quantities, and pricing from bills and receipts.
- Collaborate with project managers to approve and code costs in real time.
- Reconcile credit card charges as they happen, reducing monthly reconciliation from four days to just one and a half.
- Provide near real-time project cost visibility in QuickBooks, improving decision-making and profitability tracking.
“It’s a complete 180. We’re capturing a deeper view of project costs—quantity, price per unit, and line-item details that we never had before.”
Trey Cahill
President, Cahill Construction
The Results
Since implementing MakersHub, Cahill Construction has dramatically improved efficiency, visibility, and collaboration across its financial operations:
64+
hours saved per month, eliminating manual data entry and reconciliation
4x
faster credit card reconciliation, reducing from 4 days to 1.5 days
These improvements have also eliminated the need to hire additional administrative staff, provided real-time cost visibility for faster project updates and better decision-making, improved estimator feedback loops to refine pricing on future projects, and established a centralized approvals hub that enhances collaboration between finance and operations.
“Most people think AI is just some computer wanting to take over the world. They’d be shocked to hear that we use AI right now—and that it works. It eliminated days of monotonous data entry that no one wanted to do and freed up our employees to engage in the kind of meaningful work they enjoy.”
Trey Cahill
President, Cahill Construction
Ready to Improve Project Cost Control?
See how MakersHub can help your team save time, improve visibility, and scale your financial operations.