How Romar Energy grew its workforce without growing its admin

Romar Energy is a mechanical contractor specialising in plumbing, heating and ventilation. The business was doing well and growing - but the admin behind it was still built for a smaller company.

The challenge

The biggest pressure was headcount. Romar was taking on people quickly, and the systems for managing them - timesheets, leave, who was on which site - hadn't grown with the business.

The company, and in particular our number of employees, was growing beyond our ability to keep track of in any organised fashion.

The same was true of materials: more sites meant more purchases, and no easy way to know what had been bought where, or how much of it was left.

Kevin, the owner, was looking for better ways to stay on top of where the business was with its work. A recommendation from another contractor introduced him to Trave.

The fix: Trave

The gap is a familiar one for growing contractors who are past the point where manual admin works but nowhere near needing a system built for multinationals. Trave was built for companies at exactly that stage, with the tools Romar actually needed: job-specific cost reports, leave and work management, and invoice management.

We've grown to the point where it's too much to keep managing things manually, but we're not at the scale where we need a system designed for a much larger organisation.

The onboarding experience confirmed Romar's choice. "We had the chance to meet with the team at Trave face to face for a full demonstration of the system. I found this unique and invaluable, both for understanding the system's current features and for building a relationship with the people behind it."

Romar started while jobs were already running, so they moved one part of the business at a time rather than switching everything over at once. The Trave team has demonstrated each new feature as it's released and kept Romar informed about what's next on the roadmap.

Trave's impact on Romar Energy

Invoices checked on arrival

Before Trave, a subcontractor invoice arrived by email, got printed, and went into a binder. Checking it meant someone going through the paperwork by eye and matching the cost against what Romar normally pays, the jobs done and the hours worked.

Now the check happens on arrival, and doesn't have to wait until the office has time.

You can spot it instantly as soon as the invoice comes in, rather than having to come back to it later.

The time saving for Romar has been substantial: "For things such as invoice management and tracking, it reduced our time by around 50 to 80% compared with how long they would have taken manually."

For Marina, the bigger benefit is the recordkeeping itself. "It saves us a lot of time when we need to go back and check things, rather than flicking through binders for the paper invoices."

A growing workforce, one clear view

The office can now trace any product to the job it belongs to.

It's much easier to find a specific product for a specific job and see exactly how much has been spent on, say, heat pumps for a particular apartment complex.

Staff manage where and when they're working, including which part of the site they're on each day, and submit their own leave through the platform. "These combined make it easier for us in the office to have a much clearer overview of everything," says Marina.

From binders to AI-run admin

Marina's role at Romar is telling in itself: she describes it as overseeing an AI organisational model that streamlines invoice tracking, cost reports and employee management. A year ago that admin lived in binders.

Staff management, timesheets and leave have moved over to Trave completely. Invoices and budgets are next, helped by Trave's recently released budgeting and estimates features. The goal for the next year, says Marina, is "that complete shift away from manual cost management towards full automation."

Would Marina recommend Trave to others in the construction industry?

Absolutely. For small to midsize companies, Trave offers a straightforward range of features, including invoice and workforce management, job-specific cost reporting, ordering and forms, making it a strong fit for companies of our size.

Running a growing contractor on binders and spreadsheets that can't keep up? Book a free demo and see Trave on one of your live projects.