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A documented ABAX project. Real problems, real iterations, real numbers. By the end of year two, the owner felt the whole system had cost him nothing, because it paid for itself out of the money it made him.
New value in year one
Costs saved, year one
Sales from the client portal
Net cost after 2 years
This is a real project. The client's name is withheld for confidentiality; every figure below is theirs.
A commercial engineering firm running a team of field and project engineers. On paper, a healthy business. Underneath, two problems were quietly draining time and money, and no amount of effort seemed to fix them.
"We were good at engineering. We were terrible at the paperwork around it, and the paperwork was eating us alive."
Estimating materials and managing budgets was brutally complex. It spanned dozens of line items, changing prices and multiple projects at once. They never quite got it right, over-ordering here, under-budgeting there, and the errors compounded into lost margin on nearly every job.
Their invoices were highly custom and client-specific. Producing them meant roughly 20 hours every single week, just to order, organize and send the billing. That's half a full-time role spent on formatting, not engineering.
We shipped value early and kept adding. Each iteration paid for the next.
We rebuilt the two hardest workflows first. The system now handles materials estimation and budgeting automatically, the thing they could never get right by hand. It also generates their custom, client-specific invoices automatically, and connects straight to QuickBooks to send them, a process that used to be entirely manual.
Next we gave them an unfair advantage. An RPA engine now scans 30+ vendor sites every day, pulling live prices on each material straight from each vendor's page. The firm instantly sees the cheapest source and the best offers for every item. In parallel, we built a fully automated labor system where engineers log time, order tasks and manage their work in one place.
Still within year one, we opened the system up. A client portal lets the firm's own customers tap into the same sourcing power, saving money without hunting through dozens of vendors themselves. It turned an internal tool into a selling point.
Here's what makes this project one we love to tell. The system didn't just save time, it generated far more than it cost, so the investment paid for itself out of its own returns.
| Line item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Costs saved (year 1) | +$55,000 | Less waste, no more 20 hrs/week on invoices |
| New value generated (year 1) | +$180,000 | Better pricing, +35% sales from the portal |
| Project cost | −$120,000 | Paid over 2 years (≈ $60k/yr) |
| Net, year one alone | +$115,000 | Value & savings, minus that year's project payment |
The project cost $120k, spread across two years. In year one alone it returned roughly $235k in combined savings and new value. By the time the two-year payment period ended, the owner felt like the entire system had been free, because every dollar he paid for it came out of the money it had already earned him.
"It paid for itself. The money for the project came out of what the project made us. It never felt like a cost."
The relationship didn't end at launch, it compounded. Today the firm pays:
That second number is the real proof. When a client keeps voluntarily investing in more software, it's because the last round already paid off. That's exactly the outcome we design for from day one.
Automatic estimation and budgeting across projects, the workflow they could never get right by hand.
Client-specific invoices generated and sent through QuickBooks, replacing ~20 hours of manual work weekly.
A bot scans 30+ vendor sites daily for live material prices, surfacing the cheapest source automatically.
Engineers log time, order tasks and manage their work in one automated place, no more scattered tracking.
Customers access the firm's sourcing power directly, the feature that drove a 35% sales increase.
New modules added every year, because each round keeps paying for the next.
Tell us where your business leaks time and money. We'll show you honestly what's possible, and what it's worth.