Framers paid Friday at noon, in six states

Sablewood Builders frames houses. On a busy week that means 140 subcontractors on 30 job sites, from Round Rock to Oklahoma City, each of them invoicing by the job and each of them expecting to be paid on Friday.

Until last year, Friday meant two people in the Austin office printing checks, overnighting the ones that had to go out of state, and sending wires to the crew leads who would not wait for the mail. Hector Salinas, Sablewood's controller, estimates it took fourteen hours a week between them, and cost a little over $61,000 a year in wire fees, postage and check stock.

Why checks lasted so long

“Our framers don't want an app,” Hector said. “They want the money in the account they already have, on the day we said.” Every payroll product Sablewood tried asked contractors to sign up for something. Pinnacle asked them to type in their bank details once, through a link sent by text.

Within a month, 131 of the 140 had done it. The remaining nine were paid by check for one more cycle and then followed.

What Friday looks like now

The project managers approve hours in Fieldbook through Thursday. On Friday morning the run builds itself from those hours, and Hector reviews the total against the jobs' budgets. Runs over $250,000 need a second approver, so the CFO taps her security key from wherever she is.

• About 71% of the framers bank somewhere that takes RTP and are paid within seconds.
• The rest are paid same-day ACH, which lands by the end of the day as long as the run is approved by 2:30 PM ET.
• Every framer gets a receipt with the job, the hours and the rail the money took.

The part nobody expected

The change Hector talks about most is not speed. It is that the calls stopped. “We used to get twenty calls on a Friday afternoon asking where a check was. Now we get maybe one, and it's usually somebody who changed banks and forgot to tell us.”

In January, Pinnacle filed 152 1099-NECs for Sablewood, including the twelve framers who had worked only part of the year. Three TIN mismatches had been caught and fixed back in the spring.