West Coast Drywall and Paint is a highly-rated subcontractor in Southern California. Their Chief Financial Officer (Keith Caneva), Controller (Julie Hammack), and Contract Administrator (Elizabeth Gonzalez) all have a lot on their plates when business is booming, as it often is at the company.
As they take on new jobs, an important part of ensuring payment and securing finances is sending required preliminary notices. “Most of our customers are accustomed to getting prelims. It’s really just a standard operating procedure for anyone in construction,” explains Keith when asked if he gets any push back after sending notices.
While sending these notices is a normal part of everyday business, it can become time-consuming and stressful. Yet for Keith and his team, this process is not a point of stress because they use Levelset to streamline the tasks associated with filing notices and remove the burden of manual data entry. However, this wasn’t always how they operated.
“Before Levelset, we did everything manually. We completed our documents by hand and had to send out everything by certified mail. We kept a spreadsheet of every customer and every piece of mail that went out or came in. It was hectic work, and there was a lot to track,” says Elizabeth.
Keith agrees, “the whole process for preliminary notices is extremely tedious, and it can be scary if you think there’s a chance things may be falling through the cracks.”
Then in 2017, Keith was introduced to Levelset, and he realized that cloud-based lien rights management was the solution to the challenges they faced around notice accuracy and efficiency.
“We decided to go ahead and migrate over to Levelset so we could be in a better position to manage the day-to-day work in terms of tracking all of our notices,” says Keith.
With Levelset in place, Elizabeth and others on the team found that managing paperwork and tracking deadlines was much less of a burden.
“It’s really convenient to have a system like Levelset where all we have to do is enter the job information, and then we know everything else will get done on time and we won’t miss deadlines,” says Elizabeth. “With Levelset, we are able to complete notices in half the amount of time now that the process isn’t done manually.”
Paperwork is not only completed faster — it’s also done more efficiently.
“Levelset is streamlining duties within our department from an efficiency standpoint,” says Julie. “I can have the accounting specialists save time that they can use to generate profit rather than just filing paperwork and doing tedious things.”
Notice accuracy is improved as well, as the team uses Levelset Scout Research to ensure they have correct job site and property owner information to keep their lien rights valid.
“That’s the other thing that is so helpful about Levelset – the preliminary information is more accurate,” says Keith. “The Scout Research team looks into each one of these notices and ensures we have the information up to date and accurate as we’re issuing the notices out.”
At the end of the day, Keith and his team view Levelet as an investment that not only makes payment paperwork easy, but also keeps them educated so they can continue to grow and remain competitive in their industry.
“We’re much better educated on the lien rights process because we’re using Levelset. This platform has raised our knowledge in terms of how lien rights work. When you’re in the system, you’re being educated,” says Keith. “In fact, I can definitely say that we’re much better educated today in terms of how this all works because we’re using Levelset rather than back in the day when we used to do it by ourselves.”
West Coast Drywall isn’t the only subcontractor using Levelset to manage preliminary notices more efficiently. Learn how contractors and suppliers across the country partner with Levelset to secure receivables, protect lien rights, and so much more.