A fence contractor in Oregon wanted to build a profitable business that lasts. In Ambrook, he replaced personal spreadsheets and docs with a scalable system that shows him what he earns, where he spends, and how to keep growing the operation.

Meet Roper Bingham

Roper is the owner of Bottom Line Fence in North Powder, Oregon. He grew up there, watching his parents start the fencing company when he was 10 years old and helping out around the business. After a handful of years away for college in Utah, where he started a fencing company of his own, he eventually came home to buy his parents' operation. Today he runs Bottom Line Fence with a crew of four, including himself and his wife Justine.

The company was founded on the Binghams’ belief in straightforward pricing. After experiences being overcharged on fencing jobs as clients, they decided to build an operation that offered good prices and transparent billing to their community. The family started out doing fencing for friends and neighbors, then the business expanded from there.

The challenge: A system that lived in Roper’s head

Numbers were always Roper’s strong suit. “Growing up, math made sense,” he said. “My mind works on numbers and visual things a lot better.” He was fluent in software like Google Sheets and Google Docs, so he built a bookkeeping system out of them. For example, Roper would scan receipts and add them into a doc, then cross-reference them against bank statements at the end of the month.

"It worked fine for me and made sense to me," he said. But it wasn’t always as easy for other people to pick up. He knew that as Justine started to take over more of the office work, or if they hired someone in the future, it would be a challenge to share his workflows with them.

There was another problem too. Roper has good instincts for whether a job makes him money or not, but he didn’t have a way to actually confirm it. He could add up the checks in his head and land on a rough total, but other important numbers were fuzzy. "I had no idea what our costs were on a project," he said.

In the end, it was a nudge from another contractor that convinced him to look into bookkeeping software. They were talking about how expensive accounting tools can get, when the contractor told him that if he couldn’t justify paying for one, he wasn’t chasing big enough projects. "That was kind of a shot to me," Roper said. “Like wow, quit being so cheap. It’s just fine.”

Switching to Ambrook

Roper had heard about Ambrook before on agriculture and ranching podcasts. Ambrook’s unique pitch struck a chord for him, because he eventually plans to do ranching and fencing side by side. "I was like, 'Oh, I wonder if it could work for my fencing business,’” and later his ranch, too.

He also had a point of reference at home. Roper had watched his mom run the family ranch’s finances on QuickBooks, and he decided he wanted to try something newer. He signed up for Ambrook and set up the platform almost entirely on his own, connecting an external bank account and opening a business cash account with Ambrook Wallet.

From the beginning, he was surprised by how intuitive the software felt. While Roper expected Ambrook to feel different from bookkeeping in spreadsheets and docs, workflows like tagging transactions or adding receipts ended up being easier than he anticipated. He remembered seeing his mom work through complicated flows in QuickBooks; now he could do them in a few steps.

What changed: A shared view of his expenses

One of the first things Roper set up was Ambrook Wallet. The crew previously didn’t have business spending cards from their bank, so he funded his Wallet account and issued Ambrook cards for himself and Justine. The cards soon became a fixture of their financial routine, as the pair used them to purchase regular expenses like fencing supplies and fuel.

Roper liked that Wallet helped him stay on top of receipts. The instant notifications he got after charging the card were his reminder to take a photo of the receipt, upload it, and not have to worry about keeping track later. “Ambrook Wallet is fantastic because it emails you every time you get something," he said.

It also meant that Roper and Justine now had one place for both of them to log in and see their business expenses, no matter who actually made the purchase. Combined with transactions from their connected bank account, this turned the Ambrook ledger into their shared source of truth.

One place for estimates and invoices

Estimates and invoicing are another process Roper consolidated with Ambrook. Before, he would make estimates manually in Google Docs, then download them as PDFs to send to customers. If they approved the estimate, he would go back in and remake the invoice.

Now, everything happens in Ambrook. Roper creates estimates directly in the platform, fills in the details, and hits send. It’s easy to edit them if customers have changes, and converting them to invoices afterward takes him a few clicks. Later, when he needs to check which invoices are still unpaid and who to follow up with, it only takes Roper a glance at his dashboard.

Understanding profit by project, category, and enterprise

All in all, one of the biggest benefits of the switch was Roper’s new ability to precisely break down profit and loss. There are many different ways he wants to understand his business. There’s how much he spends and earns on a given project, but also how much he’s spent on subcontractors overall; he needs to track how much he spends on fencing supplies specifically, but also how much he’s spent on supplies in total, ranching included.

In Ambrook, Roper set up tags to assign transactions to each of the breakdowns he wanted to track. He could mark that a transaction was a subcontractor expense, as well as which project it was associated with. And importantly, it was a system he could collaborate on with Justine.

Part of Roper’s monthly reconciliation routine now involves going through the analytics in Ambrook, understanding their profitability, and determining where they can improve. He looks at net profit, gross income, expenses, and the numbers for each project. “And then from there: Okay, this is our profit margin. Do we need to improve on that?”

Looking forward: A business that lasts

In the long run, Roper’s vision is to build a lasting business that has the potential to sell. That means growing an operation with strong recurring revenue and finances that aren’t dependent on him.

By moving from a homegrown bookkeeping system to Ambrook, he’s developed a financial system that makes it possible for himself and his staff to know their numbers:

• Cut weekly bookkeeping time from 3 hours to 1

• Tracked profitability for 5 projects in one place

• Managed 2 spending cards with Ambrook Wallet

• Replaced spreadsheets and docs with one estimate-to-invoice flow

He’s already been thinking about tax time and how much easier it will be this year to hand the books over to his uncle, who’s also his accountant.

With finances that live in a place his family and crew can share, Roper is putting together everything it takes to build the business he has in mind. “Ultimately, it provides me transparency in the business, where I can have more than one person looking at the finances and making it work that way.”