Cornerstone Development Company

The Company: About Cornerstone Development Suite

When President Kristin and CEO Chad Shaules founded Cornerstone Development Company in 2017, they were supporting a vision of a changed construction industry. What started as a husband-and-wife team flipping houses has matured into a multi-entity powerhouse. The firm has now expanded to more than 70 full-time employees. Its five entities manage eight-figure construction projects, engineering for the nation’s largest public utilities, and environmental compliance management for state and federal governments.

The Situation: Multi-Entity Management

As the company scaled from a single corporation into five distinct entities, the manual burden of financial management became a bottleneck. By migrating to Intuit Enterprise Suite, Cornerstone replaced fragmented systems and prohibitively expensive manual processes with a unified platform. Shaules describes their current level of financial clarity as the difference between ​“flying blind versus a clear windshield.”

The pitfalls of manual multi-entity management

 For Cornerstone, the growth from one company to five — spanning construction, consulting, and utility engineering — created an accounting nightmare. Per Shaules, each subsidiary has ​“drastically different needs,” requiring three distinct types of GAAP-compliant accounting within the same industry.

Staying on their previous system meant unneeded entries, additional payroll costs, and a ​“wild amount of room for error.” The leadership team estimated they were spending 20+ hours a month on manual data integration in order to see a complete picture of the enterprise. This lack of real-time data meant financial forecasting was a lagging indicator rather than a strategic tool. ​“When you attempt to break apart construction project management and construction accounting,” Shaules says, ​“You create a problem where it’s incredibly difficult to financially forecast a project in real-time.”

The Solution: Intuit Enterprise Suite

Cornerstone needed a platform that could grow faster than the company itself. While leadership had considered whether they would ​“outgrow QuickBooks,” the Intuit Enterprise Suite team provided a roadmap that aligned with their complexity.

Cornerstone leveraged several key ERP capabilities to stabilize their foundation:

• Multi-entity consolidation: Standardize five entities with a shared chart of accounts and automated intercompany transactions, eliminating manual processes.
• AI-driven Insights: Utilizing AI plus HI (human intelligence) to flag projects where profit margins were below expectations.

Deep integration stack: Unifying QuickBooks Payroll, Time, and Bill Pay to ensure that ​“six-figures worth of payroll” moves seamlessly from a mobile clock-in to employees’ bank accounts.

The Results: Intuit Enterprise Suite Implementation Benefits

The shift to Intuit Enterprise Suite transformed the finance team from a reactive cost center to a proactive strategic hub by:

Eliminating the ​“manual data tax”

Previously, producing CPA-reviewed financials for five entities required significant manual labor. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, Shaules can now quickly manage eliminations and ​“boom, everything’s consolidated, ready for review” with the click of a button. This has resulted in a 50% reduction in month-end close time and significantly lowered the cost of external CPA audits.

High-stakes payroll & payment reliability

In the construction world, trust is currency. Cornerstone processes six-figure payrolls every Friday, a task Shaules describes as a ​“very stressful part of the job.” By integrating Intuit Enterprise Suite with QuickBooks Time and Payroll, Cornerstone has achieved a ​“seamless link” where employees are paid by the next day.

Using AI as a margin protector

Per Saules, Intuit Enterprise Suite’s AI recently flagged a specific line item that was underperforming. While the human intelligence (HI) of the team identified it as an outlier, the ​“reliable insight that requires little to no payroll hours to get” allows the leadership team to focus on running the business rather than hunting for data.

Intuit Enterprise Suite helps this construction company scale with true visibility

As they bid on new eight-figure projects, the ability to see cash flow in real-time is a competitive advantage. Shaules’ advice to other CEOs is simple: ​“Make the investment into your business by making the investment into Intuit Enterprise Suite.” For Cornerstone, this isn’t just about accounting; it’s about the peace that comes from tracking and understanding financial reality in real time.