Northwest construction group replaces fragmented payroll, workforce, and project financial workflows with connected finance and HR systems built for multi-entity operations.
Construction
Disconnected financial, payroll, and workforce systems created growing operational friction across PRG Group's multi-entity construction business, forcing teams into manual reconciliation and highly inefficient payroll workflows.
It sounds straightforward. For a multi-entity construction business running luxury residential builds, commercial projects, and subcontracting operations across Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, it was anything but.
Amanda is Director of Technology and Training at PRG Group. She started five years ago as a project coordinator, fell in love with the financial side of construction operations, and has spent the years since working toward a single goal: a fully integrated, zero-workaround operational environment. She owns the tech stack—what goes in it, how it integrates, how people use it, and what it costs the business when it doesn't work.
Sage Intacct Construction and Sage HCM got her there.
PRG Group's previous accounting system wasn't failing dramatically. It was failing quietly—at the edges, under volume, in the gaps between systems. When Amanda described the software they were using and the volume it was handling, the reaction from peers in the industry was consistent: disbelief that it was still operational at all.
The deeper problem was structural. Labor costs weren't feeding into project budgets—they only appeared on the profit and loss. Job cost allocations were calculated manually, based on estimates of who worked where and for how long. Payroll data lived in one place; project financials lived somewhere else. The connection between them was a spreadsheet and a lot of careful arithmetic.
Across a multi-entity business with shared vendors, shared customers, and a single chart of accounts, the compounding effect was significant. The same customer might be entered four different ways across four different systems—different spellings, different legal suffixes, different conventions. "Trying to figure out what the actual true information is, is really difficult when you have siloed solutions," Amanda says.
The payroll process had become the clearest symptom. PRG Group relied on outsourced accounting support—one person working round the clock for three days during every payroll cycle—just to get people paid accurately. Everything else stopped until it was done.
"We had one outsourced accounting person working around the clock on it for three days in any given payroll cycle"
Amanda King Dalman
Director of Technology and Training, PRG Group
Amanda knew what the business needed. Not a software upgrade—a connected operational environment where financial, workforce, and project data moved through the same system rather than being manually bridged across disconnected ones.
"PRG Group selected Sage Intacct Construction for project financials and Sage HCM for payroll and workforce management. The integration was already strong enough to justify both products independently. Having them in the same product family made the long-term roadmap significantly cleaner.
"Having a product that's really suited for what we do was so important, so that we don't have to make processes that don’t exactly fit for us," Amanda says. Today, project financials, payroll, budgets, contracts, purchase orders, and multi-entity operations all run through the same connected environment."
"The shift Amanda points to first isn't the payroll efficiency gain—though that's substantial. It's what happened to the quality of financial data once payroll and project financials were properly connected.
Labor costs now flow directly into project budgets. Every hour worked, tagged to the job and cost code, feeds through payroll into the ERP automatically. No manual allocation. No estimation. No reconciliation."
"For a construction business where labor is one of the largest cost variables on any project, this changes what's possible. PRG Group can now compare historic labor costs against estimates, understand where margin is being made or lost, and ask—with actual data behind the question—whether they're charging clients enough. ""We were relying on a lot of indirect data to understand that,"" Amanda says. ""Now it's so crystal clear."
The outsourced payroll support has been eliminated entirely. What previously consumed three days and a dedicated external resource is now managed in-house by two senior accountants, without disrupting their other daily responsibilities."
"The efficiency gains freed up more than time. They freed up capacity for a different kind of accounting work.
"Our accounting team has been able to spend more time on forecasting and budgeting—making smarter decisions about the business rather than reacting," Amanda says. "We're really striving to be in this place of proactive versus reactive."
The multi-entity complexity that once generated duplicate records and inconsistent data is now managed through shared vendor and customer records, a unified chart of accounts, and standardized processes across the business."
"Amanda is already thinking about what a clean, connected tech stack makes possible at the next stage. Integrated data, she argues, is the prerequisite for using AI effectively—and PRG Group has spent five years building exactly that foundation.
When solutions were siloed and data lived across spreadsheets and disconnected systems, there was no way to access the full breadth of what the business knew. Now, with a streamlined and fully integrated tech stack, the focus shifts to what comes next: using that data foundation to take lower-value tasks off the team's plate and make the next leap toward operational efficiency.
Amanda started five years ago asking one question: are we actually making money on this project? She finally has an answer she can trust. ""Now it's so crystal clear,"" she says."
