Case study: How Rouse Contracting ditched paper quoting and got hours back each week
If you’ve ever spent your night doing timesheets, chasing job info, or punching numbers into a calculator, you’ll get this one.
Rouse Contracting is an earthmoving business in the central North Island. Hayley Rouse handles H&S and admin for the business from Christchurch, while the crew is up north. She sums up the benefit of going digital pretty simply: “having NextMinute and being an administrator I can just do everything from my computer”
What life looked like before NextMinute
Back in November, the business was “actually all paper” for timesheets, and claims were being managed in Excel. That meant loads of admin and plenty of room for things to get missed.
Quoting was also old-school. Hayley’s dad was “sitting there with pen and paper and a calculator working out quotes.”
Why they started looking for software
They were working on a big subdivision and needed proper reporting that could be sent to the project claims manager.
But Hayley had the very real hesitation most tradies have when moving off paper: what happens if you’re relying on an internet connection and something drops out.
What changed once they switched
1) Quoting went from slow and manual to quick and consistent
Instead of calculator quotes, Hayley says the team can now quote by “adding in materials or adding machinery and it’s all calculated by itself.”
Even small changes became easy: “it’s just a push of a button and it’s done.”
And the result was immediate. Hayley says doing quotes electronically meant clients could receive them “within the day” and that it “chopped time down in half.”
2) Reporting stopped eating a whole day
On the reporting side, Hayley shared that her mum “used to sit there for a whole day” doing reporting, but now it’s “just click of a button” to get a report per job.
3) Invoices syncing to Xero made admin lighter
They use Xero for payroll and invoices, and Hayley says how handy it is to “sync it to Xero” and send invoices through to clients.
4) Quotes turning into jobs made the workflow simpler
Hayley also loves how clean the flow is once a quote is accepted: “I can just create a job from the quote and it’s done.”
Rolling it out to the crew (without the headache)
Rouse Contracting had 10 crew, and most were used to paper timesheets. So Hayley did what a lot of good operators do. She got hands-on early, flew up north, and supported the team through the first week.
They also had a champion in the crew who’d used electronic timesheets before and helped the rest of the boys pick it up.
The real win: time back and less stress
This is the bit that’ll hit home for a lot of tradies. When we asked what she’d say to businesses still doing everything manually, Hayley didn’t talk about “features”. She talked about getting your life back.
Her advice was basically: sign up, save the hours, and “go and spend time with your family for the weekend.”
Hayley’s takeaway
If you’ve got someone in the business still quoting with a calculator and running timesheets on paper, the switch feels big, but the payoff is real. As Hayley put it, “NextMinute has been so easy to navigate” and it “made our lives so much easier.”
Need to get your business sorted? Have a chat with AK and Mat today and they’ll put you on the right track. Click here.
