Rock Oil Synergies Inc. is based in Camrose, Alberta with satellite offices in Grande Prairie, Calgary, Red Deer, and the Edmonton area. They perform well site optimization and monitoring services for major oil companies in Alberta and neighbouring provinces. In the last 10 years, they have grown from about a half dozen employees to over 30 employees in multiple business divisions.

As Rock Oil's volume of business has grown over the years, they became increasingly aware of the need to supplement their accounting system so that they could streamline the management of all their field ticket data. Their goal was to have a system that would allow field workers and supervisors to enter their service tickets directly into the software so that they could be e-mailed to the consultant electronically. This approach would avoid the need for expensive, pre-printed paper tickets, and it would also avoid the inevitable room for error associated with hand-written field tickets that can be fraught with incorrect rates and math errors.

They also wanted a system that would allow them to keep better track of their extensive parts inventory. Specifically, they wanted their field guys to have access to information about what parts were in stock, and as parts were used on work tickets, to have them automatically removed from inventory. Furthermore, they wanted to ensure that as parts were used on work tickets, the proper charge-out rates were captured automatically, removing the guess work from the ticket pricing.

In the fall of 2010, Rock Oil adopted Caribou's Contractor's Edge to address their needs. "The software has really helped us get a clearer picture of all that is going on in the field, and has helped us catch and correct billing mistakes and oversights that were simply not being caught before we adopted The Contractor's Edge," says Blaine Woods, one of the owners and a primary user of the software. "It's also really helped us speed up our field-to-invoicing cycle. We often used to have a three week delay between the time work was performed and when it was invoiced. Now we can get our invoices out within 3 days of completing the work!"

Another benefit of having the field workers entering their tickets directly into the Contractor's Edge software is that it helps improve the communication between accounting and operations. Now that the guys are completing their own service tickets, for example, they avoid the step of the accounting clerk having to try to determine the exact parts that should be included on a customer invoice when the field guy has perhaps used a different part numbering convention or different abbreviations than the accounting clerk. Now, the field guy creates the service ticket, and then that exact service ticket information flows right on through to the invoice. There is no need for an accounting person to re-key the data. Rather, they can simply review it to ensure all charges and hours look correct, and then mark the ticket as ready for invoicing.

In addition, because the hours information on the field service tickets flows through to the gross payroll statements in the Contractor's Edge, there is no longer a need for the field workers to fill out paper time sheets. Instead, their time is entered automatically when they enter their service tickets.

Derek Woods, Rock Oil's President, has also commented on the benefits that he can see from adopting The Contractor's Edge. "The software has given us a whole new level of accountability. For example, now that we can see part costs and corresponding charge-out rates as we are entering service tickets, we are doing a far better job of charging accurately for our parts relative to the costs we are incurring. We have seen a notable improvement in our overall margins in the last quarter now that we are using the Contractor's Edge."

Derek also noted that they are finding the job profitability reports to be quite informative in terms of helping them understand where they are making money and where they have room to improve.

Xtreme Hot Oil & Pressure Services, Inc. is based in Hinton, Alberta and performs hot oiling, pressure pumping, tank heating, pipeline flushing, dewaxing and testing, as well as acid and methanol pumping for major oilfield companies in Alberta and British Columbia. They have grown from one truck in 2001 to over a dozen trucks today.

The moment a customer calls for a new job, the Operations Manager at Xtreme creates a work ticket in the Contractor's Edge. He then prints a job sheet from the system containing instructions for the job, along with the job location and driving directions to the site. The job sheet also has a software-generated unique ticket number for that now-open work ticket.

The operators continue to complete their paper ticket information in the field for sign-off by the consultant, as they always have. When that paper ticket comes back to the office, it's easy for the operations manager to find the open ticket in the Contractor's Edge, and enter in the hours worked and materials used from the paper ticket.

The software auto-fills the billing rates set up for each equipment unit/customer. It also picks up any discounts that have been negotiated with that customer.  The auto-filled rate information allows rate errors on the physical field paperwork to be caught and corrected immediately. Furthermore, it makes it very easy to identify any tickets that were dispatched, but whose paperwork is still outstanding, providing one more safeguard against missed billing.

Each ticket generally take less than three minutes to complete in the software once the operators hand them in. Once the ticket is completed, an invoice can be printed directly from the software, helping to expedite the billing cycle.

Another big benefit of the Contractor's Edge is the rich business reports that it can generate. Users can view profit margins on each work ticket, or across all work tickets in a given date range. Margins can be monitored from one customer to the next, and can be used for bidding and negotiating purposes.

The Contractor's Edge has also streamlined the payroll cycle because there is no more re-handling of tickets and re-keying of daily hours for payroll. All the hours information from the individual work tickets flow automatically into gross payroll statements. These reports can be quickly cross-referenced against time sheets that the workers may turn in separately, and any shop hours can be captured against a shop "job." Payroll reports can then be printed at the click of a button, and the Operations Manager can easily monitor the percentage of billable versus shop work.

Rocky Mountain Energy Ltd. is an instrumentation and electrical contractor in Hinton, Alberta that works for a variety of oilpatch companies in Western Canada. The company has grown from 6 employees and subcontractors in 2009 to 20 today. Ryan Woodley, one of the owners, knew very early on that a good software system to manage their work flow was a critical factor in successfully handling the company's rapid growth.

The Contractor's Edge allows Rocky Mountain to keep up with each and every field ticket, and to manage them through the approval and invoicing process. Each day, the field technicians complete paper work tickets documenting the quantities of labor, parts, etc. used on the job. After the operations manager reviews the paper tickets, they are entered into the software, where the charge-out rates auto-fill based on default rates set up for each job/customer, reducing room for error. The book-keeper prints the electronic version of the costed ticket for their records, and can e-mail it to the customer's consultant, which is especially nice if the consultant was not available on the job site to sign off on the paper copy.

Because the tickets can be easily sorted based on their stage in the approval and invoicing process, it allows the managers a fast and easy way to identify which tickets need attention and why (based on comments in the "internal notes" associated with the work ticket). It is also very efficient for Rocky Mountain to monitor the dollars associated with their work in progress for month end reporting purposes.

The Contractor's Edge is also an effective job costing system. Ryan and the other owners can see all the revenue and costs associated with a given ticket, summarized by labor, equipment, parts, etc. This kind of information is critical for knowing the economics of their business and helping them prepare bids for similar jobs in the future. It has also been instrumental for rate discussions with their customers to help customers understand the circumstances where Rocky legitimately needed a rate increase to do a similar job in the future.

Aside from its value as an internal tracking and job costing system, the software has proven to be a valuable asset in terms of allowing Rocky Mountain to provide good service to its customers. "I can answer questions from my customers on a dime, now that I have the Caribou system in place," says Ryan. "If they have an issue with a ticket, I don't have to dig around in a file cabinet through piles of paper tickets. I can just call up the ticket while the customer is on the phone and see exactly what we did on that job. Or if a customer calls and wants to know if we did work at a particular well site in a certain date range, I can just go into the software and do a look-up by LSD for that time frame and see whether or not we did that work." Ryan is also able to provide comprehensive reports to his customers if, for example, they want a summary of all the work performed on a particular job site for the life of the job. "If I can make my customer's life a little easier by running reports that take me almost no time, I'm all for it!", says Ryan.

Outlaw Oilfield Services out of Edson, Alberta, provides tank truck services to major oilpatch companies in Alberta. Before Outlaw implemented the Contractor's Edge, they were tracking each of their truck trip tickets through Excel worksheets to form the basis for their billing and payroll, which they handled through Simply Accounting. For one of their larger customers, they were having to rekey the ticket information yet again into the customer's online invoicing system.

Now that Outlaw has the Contractor's Edge, they are no longer having to rekey ticket information into their customer's online billing system. Instead, they generate an electronic export from the Contractor's Edge and are able to upload it directly into the online billing system.

Outlaw continues to use Simply Accounting as their overall financial system, but they now generate their invoices for their customers through the Contractor's Edge. They have also eliminated the Excel spreadsheets from their office process, reducing the inevitable room for errors with spreadsheet formulas and copying/pasting/sorting. In addition, because the Contractor's Edge operates in a multi-user environment, two people can be entering tickets at the same time, an advantage they did not have with Excel.

Another advantage of The Contractor's Edge over Excel is the reporting that the system affords. Once the tickets are entered into the software, it is simply a matter of a few clicks to generate customer invoices, generate reports showing truck hours and delivery information, and generate payroll statements. There is no need to manipulate the data manually to generate the necessary reports. The users at Outlaw find the reports to be quick, easy, and useful because they are tailored to Outlaw's specific business requirements.

As Roxanne Stetzer, one of the main users at Outlaw observed, "I found the software very user friendly and easy to learn. I would estimate that between the ease of creating the payroll reports and the elimination of double entry of data for our online invoicing, we save about 5 days a month of time compared to our approach prior to getting the software. This has made a huge difference in terms of keeping my other responsibilities totally caught up. I love the program, and we seem to be breezing through the months with The Contractor's Edge!"

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