- Company: Aloise Builders, Inc.
- Location: Harvard, Massachusetts
- Established: 2003
- Industry: General Contracting – Custom Homes and Renovations
- Fun fact about Christine: In her spare time, she makes small furniture, cutting boards, and other items in her small woodworking shop.
- Company fact: Aloise Builders is expanding into green home construction. Christine and Nick are both Phius Certified Passive House Builders, pursuing net zero, passive houses built to use less energy and last longer.
When Christine Sansevero joined Aloise Builders as Chief Operating Officer, she brought 30 years of experience in engineering, field work, and project oversight. She also brought a fresh perspective and a goal of helping the business become even more efficient. Since starting a year ago, she’s used ezClocker to track her field crew’s time and labor costs.
From One-Person Operation to a Growing Team
Owner Nick Aloise spent 23 years building the business. Christine knew him well, having hired him for projects five times herself.
“Nick had been a one-man band,” Christine says. “He’d been doing the contracting, swinging the hammer, and doing the books.”
After three decades at the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine made a career change. “I went from an organization of 15,000 to an organization of five,” she says.
Today, Aloise Builders, Inc. includes Nick, Christine, four carpenters, and a network of subcontractors. The team handles everything from kitchen and bathroom renovations to large-scale whole-house renovations, with a growing focus on energy-efficient building. With multiple jobs running at once, knowing where labor hours go is essential.
The Search for a Simple, Effective Solution
Before ezClocker, Aloise Builders used paper timecards and did not track labor across jobs because it took too much time. Christine wasn’t looking for an all-in-one construction platform.
“Small businesses often get lost in the shuffle because they cannot spend $1,000 a month on project management software,” Christine says. “For us, those programs offered more than we needed, were too complex, and were too expensive.”
Christine needed something her team could start using without a long learning curve. “I simply needed a straightforward tool that let me track the location and hours of our field crew,” she says.
Then she found ezClocker.
Up and Running from Day One
Her crew moves from site to site, so the tool had to work in the field. “Our carpenters all have personal cell phones,” Christine says. “The fact that ezClocker doesn’t require a computer or additional hardware was a key feature.”
Adoption was immediate. “From the day I sent our crew the link, they were off and running,” she says. Spanish-language instructions made it easy to roll out to carpenters whose first language isn’t English.
ezClocker’s geofence tool tracks where each crew member worked on any given day. “It’s easy to enter the addresses of each job in ezClocker and set the geofence criteria. Then the crew can log in and out on their phones,” Christine says. When a clock-in or clock-out time needs adjusting, a quick text is all it takes, and she makes the change in the ezClocker dashboard.
Turning Time Tracking into Job-Costing Data
The biggest payoff comes after the hours are recorded. ezClocker lets users export each crew member’s hours in a variety of formats, such as by job and then by date, or by job and then by employee. “That was an essential feature,” Christine says. “I needed a program that allowed me to export the data.”
“We have to track our labor costs,” Christine says. “ezClocker allows us to easily run payroll every week and keep tabs on how well actual labor costs match our estimates.”
Each week, Christine runs a Python program she wrote that pulls the ezClocker export into the company’s labor log and distributes the hours to the appropriate categories of each job. As a job progresses, she can track labor costs not only by job but by job category, giving the team up-to-date information to plan crew assignments and keep each project on track. Instead of waiting until a project ends to see what labor cost, she now reviews it every week.
Pricing That Grows With the Team
ezClocker’s pricing leaves room to grow. “The flat-rate pricing is a very attractive feature,” she says. “We can add new employees for no additional fee.”
For Aloise Builders, ezClocker has become a key part of the toolbox: powerful enough to provide the data the company needs, but simple enough that the crew can use it without being distracted from the actual work. Together with the systems Christine has built around it, it has freed Nick to focus on project management and given the company better insight into its operations.
“It’s been a great tool for us,” Christine says about ezClocker. “I really like it. I like the simplicity of it. Nick likes it. The guys like it.”
