R.S. Mowery & Sons has been a commercial general contractor for over a hundred years, and in that business, speed and cost-effectiveness on every awarded job depend on how tightly you can track contract buyouts - the process of finalizing agreements with the subcontractors and suppliers who’ll actually do the work, including their insurance coverage, negotiated pricing versus what was originally expected, phase codes, job codes, and scope of work.
Quick answer: R.S. Mowery & Sons’s subcontractor buyout process ran manually on an aging SharePoint list and Excel setup - slow, and unable to support real reporting. Merit IT built a fully custom buyout application integrated with Mowery’s CRM, accounting software, and DocuSign, hosted on Microsoft Azure, and migrated all historical data into it - unlocking custom reports that were previously impossible to produce.
What the old process looked like
Before working with Merit IT, Mowery ran its entire buyout process manually on top of an aging SharePoint list and Excel setup. Employees manually entered phase codes, job codes, vendor information, scope, and certificate of insurance documents; manually notified other estimators to review the work; routed it for sign-off from Mowery’s legal department; and only then executed the buyout with the subcontractor or supplier through a separate e-signature step in DocuSign. It technically worked, but it wasn’t fast - and for a contractor where margin and job speed both depend on getting buyouts finalized quickly, “it technically works” wasn’t good enough.
How Merit IT scoped and built the solution
Merit IT met repeatedly with Mowery’s ownership and key stakeholders to understand exactly how the buyout process worked in practice - not just how it was supposed to work on paper - before writing a line of code.
What came out of that process was a fully custom application designed specifically to speed up approval and sign-off on subcontractor and supplier buyout contracts, with custom integrations into Mowery’s CRM, its accounting software, and DocuSign for execution. The application brought the whole review process in-line - approvals, notes, and certificate-of-insurance document management all happen inside one tool instead of across email, spreadsheets, and a SharePoint list, giving Mowery’s estimators and reviewers a genuinely collaborative workflow instead of a manual relay race.
Why hosting and testing choices matter as much as features
The application is hosted in a secure Microsoft Azure cloud environment and built with ongoing unit and end-to-end testing, so future changes to the application can be made with confidence that they won’t break existing functionality - a deliberate choice to make the system scalable and maintainable rather than a one-off build that gets harder to touch over time.
What happened to the old data?
Merit IT also migrated and translated all of Mowery’s historical buyout data out of the old SharePoint list and Excel files and into the new application - work that had a payoff beyond just moving the process forward. Because that data now lives in a real, structured application instead of a SharePoint list, Mowery’s team can now run custom reports against that buyout data that were previously impossible to produce, since the underlying data was effectively inaccessible sitting in a SharePoint list.
The lesson for any growing business
A manual process built on spreadsheets and list tools doesn’t announce itself as a problem - it just quietly costs you speed, and speed is often exactly what determines whether a job is profitable. And data trapped in a tool like a SharePoint list isn’t really usable data, even if it’s technically “stored” somewhere - if you can’t report on it, query it, or build on it, it’s just filed away, not actually working for you. The moment a process like this starts to constrain how fast or how well you can serve customers, it’s worth asking whether custom software would pay for itself.
Frequently asked questions
What is a “contract buyout” in commercial construction? It’s the process of finalizing agreements with the subcontractors and suppliers who will actually perform the work on an awarded job - confirming scope, negotiated pricing versus what was originally estimated, insurance coverage, and the phase and job codes the work falls under, then executing the agreement.
Why isn’t a SharePoint list and Excel enough to run a process like this? They can technically store the data, but they don’t make it usable. Manually re-entering phase codes, vendor details, and certificate-of-insurance documents across a list and spreadsheets is slow and error-prone, and data sitting in a SharePoint list generally can’t be queried or reported on the way data in a real application can - so even though the information exists somewhere, it isn’t actually accessible for decision-making.
Is it worth building custom software instead of buying an off-the-shelf tool? It depends on how specific the workflow is. A process like a construction buyout - with its own approval chain, integrations into a specific CRM and accounting system, and industry-specific document requirements like certificates of insurance - often doesn’t map cleanly onto generic off-the-shelf software. When a workflow is specific enough and used often enough, custom software that fits the actual process tends to pay for itself in time saved.
What does it mean for software to be built to be “future-proof”? In practice, it means the application is built with automated unit and end-to-end tests that run against it, so when new features or changes are made later, the team can verify quickly that existing functionality still works correctly rather than manually re-checking everything by hand. It’s what makes it safe to keep improving an application over years rather than treating it as a one-time build.
Have a process like this that’s outgrown spreadsheets and email? Get a free technology assessment - or read more about how Merit IT approaches Software & AI Development.