A Kansas trucker switched her family's business from QuickBooks to Ambrook. In her first day on the platform, she caught up on months of bookkeeping that later helped her track down $10,000 in truck expenses.
After becoming an Ambrook customer, Lauren has also worked with us as a paid content creator on social media. However, this case study is based on her own experience finding and using Ambrook, and she was not paid to participate.
Meet Lauren Chase
Lauren never expected to work in trucking. Growing up on a farm in Colorado, she often went along with her dad on hauling trips and remembers that she didn’t like riding in the truck at the time. “My parents were very surprised when I decided to marry a trucker,” she explained, “and even more surprised when I decided to get my commercial driver’s license and be a trucker.”
She met her husband Colton when he was a few years into starting Chase Trucking, running local grain and liquid fertilizer. A couple years after that, Colton leased onto a hazardous materials carrier to fulfill a lifelong dream of hauling hazmat. Today they run Chase Trucking along with their own hazmat division, and Lauren manages a photography business on the side while creating social media content about life on the road.
These days their work follows a seasonal calendar: propane from November to March, liquid fertilizer from February to June, and local grain in the summer and fall seasons.
Lauren, Colton, and their son.
The challenge: Two business lines and a scattered view of the books
The moment she married into the business, Lauren took over the finances from her mother-in-law. "The week after our wedding, she handed me a book and said, 'Okay, it's your turn now.’” With a business degree and an affinity for numbers, she was happy to take things on. “It's easy for me and comes naturally," she said.
But she could never quite find bookkeeping tools that felt right for their operation. For a while Lauren did Chase Trucking’s books out of Excel, before eventually switching to QuickBooks. When she and Colton started hauling hazmat loads, they had to create a totally separate account, which didn’t fit the way Lauren thought about their business. “I was super frustrated with QuickBooks. We had to have two separate accounts,” she explained. “I could never combine and see everything all together at once.”
This meant she had to individually upload banking information and transactions to each QuickBooks account, “and it just got very cluttered and very confusing.” She didn’t feel like she could get the information she needed across the entire business, like expense and profitability breakdowns.
“I didn’t know where exactly we were spending too much money, or not making a profit on different loads or customers.”
Switching to Ambrook
When Lauren learned about Ambrook on Facebook, it came at just the right moment. She and Colton wanted to purchase a new trailer, and they needed to submit a profit and loss statement and their balance sheet to get a loan. "The bank was like, 'Well, how's your year going?'" she recalled.
The books weren't ready yet. Lauren had to get things done quickly, and she decided she might as well get their records sorted by onboarding to Ambrook. "Hopefully I can figure out this new software," she remembered thinking.
What changed: A faster path to funding
In a crunch to get documentation ready for the bank, Lauren started setting up Ambrook right after she signed up. She made different enterprises for their business divisions, so she could track every part of the operation while keeping a unified view of the books.
Next, she imported historical records and connected her accounts so new transactions would fill into the ledger. "I attached or linked all of our bank accounts and our credit card accounts,” she said.
From there, it was a matter of creating categories and making sure every transaction was properly tagged in Ambrook. “I just had to go through and, with a click of a button, categorize everything," she said.
By the end of that same day, Lauren had the books cleaned and organized for the year to date. She got the P&L and balance sheet exported from Ambrook, and sent it right back to the bank. “I was able to just email it to our banker, and he was really happy and impressed that it was that quick.” With updated financials, they were able to fast-track their loan application for the trailer.
"Within a day, I had our books caught back up and beautiful.”
A steady bookkeeping routine, built with AI suggestions and automations
Since getting the books up and running, Lauren has focused on creating a system that makes day-to-day bookkeeping as easy as possible for her. Two parts of Ambrook in particular have helped her achieve that: automations and AI suggestions.
Lauren and Colton often work with the same vendors many times; think recurring expenses like fuel, truck washes, or parts. So in Ambrook, she set up more than 50 automations that can recognize those specific transactions as they come in and categorize them for her.
After tagging her transactions consistently for a while, she also noticed AI suggestions in the ledger. This made the categorization process even easier. All she had to do now was review the suggestions and accept them. “It automatically pops up the suggestion for how it should be categorized, and I can just click the button,” she explained. “It makes it really simple.”
And for Lauren, one of the best parts was that the AI suggestions continued to improve the more she kept reviewing, accepting, and tagging. That meant her process would only get simpler and faster over time.
"The more you use it, the more the AI suggestions get to know you and your transactions. It becomes easier to use, like it's a cycle. I love it."
Expense tracking that uncovered $10,000 in truck maintenance costs
These efforts to categorize all their transactions paid off when Lauren’s reports in Ambrook revealed a larger-than-expected expense. She was carefully reviewing their fuel and maintenance costs (since those tend to be their biggest expense categories), when she found one line that surprised her: truck washes.
It was one of those recurring expenses that didn’t seem so significant each time, she explained: “You don’t feel like you’re spending very much money. I’m just going to wash the truck.” But in Ambrook, she saw that those washes had added up to thousands of dollars. “In total, it’s $10,000 that we spent on getting our trucks clean.”
Seeing that number made their options clear going forward. “We could watch that expense a little bit, or buy our own pressure washer,” she explained. Lauren applied this same approach to other maintenance expenses too, like tracking the cost of spare parts in Ambrook, and it has allowed her and Colton to make confident decisions for the operation.
“I know exactly what maintenance category is costing us more. It helps us make better decisions and be more profitable.”
Looking forward: Knowing the profitability of every truck
As she’s constantly improving her bookkeeping system, Lauren is working on a structure where she can break down the numbers for every truck and trailer. She plans to get to the point where, as she put it, "I can click on a truck and know exactly what it made us or lost us, if it was worth it to have that truck around."
With her books organized in Ambrook, she’s already using the numbers to inform big decisions across her trucking business:
Revealed $10,000 in truck wash expenses
Caught up on 6+ months of bookkeeping in one day
Tagged 2,800+ transactions using automations and AI suggestions
Lauren’s ultimate goal is to build a lasting business that can support their family, while giving them the time and freedom to work on their own terms. “We want to get to a size and profitability level where we don’t have to retire,” she said, “but we don’t have to work crazy hours either.” And she’s passing that outlook on to their son, who joins the pair on drives sometimes. “We’re teaching him how to make money and grow a business if he wants to, or work for somebody else if he wants to.”
Now, Lauren and Colton are making the most of their growing operation. “We both very, very much enjoy what we do… We’re just happy.”