How Preferred Energy Recovered $38,400 in Annual Overhead and Saw Profit Margins for the First Time
A mechanical construction company with 100+ field employees replaced manual billing with digital field ticketing, and discovered what their jobs were actually worth.
Field chaos was costing real money
Preferred Energy Inc. delivers general contracting, facility and pipeline construction, fabrication, and maintenance services across Western Canada and North Dakota. With 100+ employees spread across multiple active sites, they needed their billing to keep up with their crews. It wasn't.
Timesheets got photographed, printed, marked up by hand, then manually re-entered to create invoices. Every step in that chain was a chance for an error. Multiple versions of the same spreadsheet circulated between field and office. Charges went missing. Work got billed twice or not at all.
When fuel prices changed, Danton Moorhead, President of Preferred Energy, had to open 10 separate client spreadsheets and update each one by hand. That was the breaking point.
Four pain points they could no longer ignore
- Manual invoicing delayed cash flow Field tickets photographed, printed, marked up, and re-entered before a single invoice could go out. Every step added days to the billing cycle.
- Revenue slipping through spreadsheet errors Multiple versions of the same file meant charges got missed, duplicated, or entered incorrectly. Losses were invisible until it was too late to recover them.
- Pricing errors with every rate change Updating rates meant editing 10 separate client files by hand. One missed update meant a wrong invoice and a conversation nobody wanted to have.
- Zero visibility into profitability Without centralized data, Danton could never see actual profit margins or bid with confidence.
We were trying to get paid faster. Getting the clients to pay was not the problem. The biggest hurdle was getting tickets signed off in the field and returned to the client.
Field-first technology built for how work actually happens
Preferred Energy needed tools designed for the realities of field work, not office workflows adapted for the field. Aimsio connected crews to the office with speed and accuracy, from the first timesheet to the final invoice.
No more clipboards. No more spreadsheets. No more second-guessing.
- Mobile timesheets with offline capability Crews capture work digitally at the job site - even without cell service. Timesheets convert into field tickets in under 30 seconds.
- One-click timesheet to ticket conversion What used to take hours of manual re-entry now happens with a single tap, eliminating errors and speeding up billing.
- Centralized price books One rate sheet replaces 10+ client spreadsheets. Price changes update once and reflect everywhere instantly.
Revenue recovered. Visibility gained. Operations transformed.
The first thing to change was the administrative workload. Preferred Energy's back office recovered enough time that they no longer needed a dedicated admin for billing. That one change saved $38,400 per year.
Revenue leakage stopped. Equipment charges that used to fall through the cracks now get captured at the job site. Billing errors that came from manual re-entry disappeared when the re-entry did. Invoices go out faster and come back with fewer corrections.
Despite initial resistance, the team now considers Aimsio essential. Clients love the easy approval process. The back office has complete visibility. Field crews focus on the work that matters.
We analyzed some jobs last week and we can actually see our profit margins, which is the ultimate goal. I've never been able to see them before.
How Aimsio transformed their day-to-day operations.
There is so much value in Aimsio. When we first started off, we were only using it to create field tickets from timesheets. We now use it for dispatch, resource costing estimates, and pre-trip inspections. I don't know how we'd function without Aimsio.
More than just Preferred Energy's story
Preferred Energy is one of many field service teams sharing their experience with Aimsio. See what operations managers, project leads, and CFOs are saying across every major review platform.
