How MECO LLC Unlocked Nationwide Growth with Miter and Acumatica

MECO LLC is a nationally capable, AISC-certified steel erector that tackles complex projects across the country. Founded in 1984 and still proudly family-run, MECO has recently doubled its workforce in a year and expanded into new markets as part of a strategic push into the industrial sector — driven by a growing leadership team and a renewed focus on operational excellence.

Challenge

Company Overview

MECO LLC is a nationally capable, AISC-certified steel erector that tackles complex projects across the country. Founded in 1984 and still proudly family-run, MECO has recently doubled its workforce in a year and expanded into new markets as part of a strategic push into the industrial sector — driven by a growing leadership team and a renewed focus on operational excellence.

Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, the company is capable of working nationwide. “Many of our customers are national, with hundreds of locations across the country,” Jonathan explains. “We’re really just trying to give solutions for our customers no matter where they are.”

The Challenge: Manual Systems Holding Back Growth

As demand for MECO’s services expanded into more states, their back-office processes struggled to keep pace. The complexity of multi-state operations created compliance challenges that were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

Though Acumatica effectively served as MECO’s ERP system, its payroll and time-tracking capabilities couldn’t handle the intricacies of multi-state construction operations. Every state brought new tax rules, workers’ compensation rates, and reporting requirements. For a company with mobile crews frequently crossing state lines, this created significant administrative burdens:

• Payroll processing consumed 30+ hours weekly
• Reimbursements and per diems required 20+ hours of manual work weekly
• Paper timesheets needed creation and manual entry
• Every pay period required manual filing and payment of taxes across multiple jurisdictions
• The MECO team lacked visibility into job costs by project task, cost code, and more

“Every pay period I had to manually file and pay federal, state, and local payroll taxes for multiple states,” Jonathan explains. “As we started operating in more jurisdictions, staying compliant with all those filing deadlines was a constant challenge.”

The company’s prevailing wage work added another layer of complexity. With employees often splitting their time between prevailing wage jobs and standard projects, sometimes in different states within the same pay period, ensuring accurate wage calculations and getting visibility into job costs became increasingly difficult.

These processes weren’t just inefficient — they were actively limiting MECO’s growth potential. As Cristina Elizalde, HR Manager, puts it: “We could not grow to the point that we wanted to grow if we continued to do what we were doing. We needed a change.”

The Solution: Integrating Miter with Acumatica

Recognizing that their systems needed to evolve to match their remarkable growth, MECO’s leadership made the strategic decision in June 2024 to implement Miter and integrate it with Acumatica to streamline payroll, compliance, time tracking, and expense management. They preserved Acumatica as their financial system of record while unlocking powerful new capabilities tailored for construction.

“Our projects are set up in Acumatica, and those jobs and project tasks are syncing to Miter along with our master cost code list,” Jonathan explains, “It’s always linked to Acumatica and updating as we develop the cost codes, so we don’t have to go to another system and manually change it to match. It keeps data clean with less administrative time.”

The integration ensures:

• The work breakdown structure defined in Acumatica syncs to Miter, including projects, project tasks, and cost codes
• GL account groups, accounts, and sub-accounts are also automatically pulled into Miter
• Time, expense, and other payroll data captured in Miter is sent back to Acumatica, hitting both the general ledger and project budgets
• Employee data is kept in sync from Miter to Acumatica, allowing for even more detailed job costing

With Miter and Acumatica working in sync, MECO has seen incredible results across the business from improved financial reporting and confidence in compliance to improved employee happiness and workflows that scale nationwide.

Outcome #1:

Precise, Reliable Job Costing 

Before Miter, MECO had limited visibility into job costs. “Acumatica’s payroll system didn’t really let us use all the details we wanted from processing payroll for our estimating, tracking, and billing purposes,” explains Jonathan.

Now, with projects, tasks, cost codes, account groups, employees and more flowing seamlessly between Miter and Acumatica, MECO is able to:

• Eliminate double entry because the sync ensures that only cost codes assigned to a project in Acumatica will be available on that project in Miter
• Automatically generate journal entries that sync to Acumatica in the right format for cost analysis
• Compare estimated versus actual costs in real time
• Track billable hours, non billable hours, and costs by project task, cost code, and more

Acumatica is the source of truth, so any changes in Acumatica sync through to Miter, saving the MECO team from having to duplicate work across systems. “Then once it’s in Miter, it gives us more options with activities, permissions,” explains Jonathan.

For example, Jonathan is able to control which cost codes are visible to field employees in the Miter app when they are clocking in or submitting expenses. “Acumatica wouldn’t let us choose a project-specific cost code on the app,” shares Jonathan. “You’d see every single cost code for your company — so there was no way the field could have any idea which code to select without cross-referencing another list.” Narrowing the options with Miter’s granular permission control ensures more accurate time tracking and expense submissions, which is critical for accurate estimating and budgeting.

With cleaner, more detailed labor data flowing between systems, MECO has sharpened its ability to analyze job costs, catch discrepancies early, and refine future estimates. “Miter gives us more accurate job cost data which ultimately helps us stay competitive and increase project profitability,” says Jonathan.”

Outcome #2:

Multi-State Payroll and Compliance on Autopilot

One of the most significant improvements for MECO has been automating their multi-state payroll and compliance processes, which saves time and reduces risk.

Miter also makes it easy for the MECO team to ensure they’re paying their employees the correct rates when they work on multiple types of jobs in multiple states. “Miter makes it really easy for us to see what the fringe rate is going to be and make sure we’re paying everyone precisely the right amount,” Cristina explains. “This is especially important when we have employees that work two or three days on a prevailing wage job and then go work on a non-prevailing wage job in another state.”

Cristina used to spend considerable time chasing employees to complete state withholding forms whenever they crossed state lines. Now, the process is seamless and automated. “With Miter, employees don’t even have to look at the form – they just answer the questions in the app. It takes 5 minutes,” says Cristina. The system even automatically triggers the appropriate state withholding form when an employee submits their first timesheet in a new state.

Year-end processing has been similarly transformed: “W2s took the two of us multiple days plus stuffing and mailing envelopes. We didn’t have any of that this year. It was just done,” says Jonathan.

For Jonathan, the impact has been personal: “Miter has really improved my life. I’m not worried about penalties or missing deadlines for multi-state tax compliance anymore. It’s so much less stressful.”

MECO now has a payroll system that scales with them, supports their national expansion, and frees up leadership to focus on growth, strategic planning, and employee well-being — instead of paperwork.

Outcome #3:

Streamlined Expense Management

Before Miter, MECO’s expense management process was time-consuming and cumbersome for both office staff and field employees. Per diems alone required extraordinary effort from the administrative team. “We were creating every single reimbursement — like per diems for every employee every day — manually,” says Cristina.

Miter cards have also been a boon to the field team as well as the back office. “Now that we have Miter cards, our foremen and managers don’t have to spend their own money and wait to be reimbursed for a week and a half. And we don’t have to manually enter those reimbursements — they just sync automatically every week.”

The integration with Acumatica ensures that all expenses are properly coded according to MECO’s work breakdown structure in Miter and seamlessly flow back to Acumatica for proper accounting and job costing. “We don’t have to manually enter those reimbursements — they sync through the journal entry every week,” Jonathan explains. This automation ensures expenses are properly tracked against project budgets with minimal administrative effort.

Outcome #4:

Bridging Field and Office Operations

Miter has helped MECO connect field operations with back-office functions, creating more cohesive and efficient workflows. Now the office can assign tasks and permissions to employees who are able to access everything they need from the Miter app.

The app enables employees to clock in, request time off, complete forms, check paystubs and more – all in one place. Now instead of calling Cristina to request a day off, employees can request it on their phone in seconds. “All our employees love the Miter app,” says Cristina. “And they love that it’s bilingual because some of our employees speak better Spanish than they do English.”

And because Cristina can control granular permissions for the team, their foremen and job site managers are able to approve time for their teams, which takes the responsibility off of her shoulders.

Impact:

Unlocking Nationwide Growth

With Miter, MECO turned complex payroll into a competitive advantage — and cleared the runway for nationwide expansion. “There’s no fear anymore. We want to grow to every single state that we can,” Cristina states. “As opposed to before, we knew there was going to be a bunch of paperwork we’d have to figure out. Now, Miter does the thinking for us so we can take action.”

With their administrative burden dramatically reduced, MECO’s leadership team can prioritize strategic initiatives: “Now we’re able to just focus on business growth, maintaining our certifications, and financial decisions. We’ve got a lot more insight and reporting to make good data-driven decisions for the company.” Jonathan and his team are using their increased bandwidth to launch an employee benefits program and offer a 401(k) plan through Miter Benefits.

The transformation has improved quality of life for the team: “It gives us a better work-life balance. We’re no longer spending all our time at work thinking about problems– or taking that stress home with us. There’s peace of mind now that wasn’t there before,” shares Jonathan.

By combining powerful software with exceptional service, Miter has helped MECO transform from a company outgrowing its administrative processes to one positioned for nationwide growth.