Connecting Field and Finance: How Speedchain Codes Construction Purchases at the Point of Spend
Connecting Field and Finance: How Speedchain Codes Construction Purchases at the Point of Spend
The data lag problem
A purchase made in August often doesn’t show up on a job cost report until September. Payroll, subcontractors and PO’d materials arrive with the job already attached. Field purchases don’t. The receipt has to be collected, the job and cost code have to be chased down, and then the transaction waits for month-end close. Field purchases routinely land on job cost reports weeks after the money is spent.
In a business with an average pretax margin of about 6.7%, that delay can be expensive. An $11,000 materials overrun that nobody sees for five weeks is more than 8% of the profit on a $2 million job. And the costs that never get placed land in overhead, which makes jobs look more profitable than they are and inflates the baseline for the next bid.
The people closest to the problem feel it differently:
• Field operators buy what the crew needs, often at the same supply house for more than one job, and may only make it into the office once every few weeks.
• Project managers and superintendents approve spend they can’t see in context and find overruns after it’s too late to act.
• Finance teams chase receipts and job codes across crews, then post transactions late. The receipt chase can take multiple hours every single month. In fact, as much as 70% of transactions are coded incorrectly and require recoding.
Speedchain’s customers asked for a simple thing: capture the job, cost code and receipt at the moment of purchase, while the person who made it still remembers why.
The data lag problem
A purchase made in August often doesn’t show up on a job cost report until September. Payroll, subcontractors and PO’d materials arrive with the job already attached. Field purchases don’t. The receipt has to be collected, the job and cost code have to be chased down, and then the transaction waits for month-end close. Field purchases routinely land on job cost reports weeks after the money is spent.
In a business with an average pretax margin of about 6.7%, that delay can be expensive. An $11,000 materials overrun that nobody sees for five weeks is more than 8% of the profit on a $2 million job. And the costs that never get placed land in overhead, which makes jobs look more profitable than they are and inflates the baseline for the next bid.
The people closest to the problem feel it differently:
• Field operators buy what the crew needs, often at the same supply house for more than one job, and may only make it into the office once every few weeks.
• Project managers and superintendents approve spend they can’t see in context and find overruns after it’s too late to act.
• Finance teams chase receipts and job codes across crews, then post transactions late. The receipt chase can take multiple hours every single month. In fact, as much as 70% of transactions are coded incorrectly and require recoding.
Speedchain’s customers asked for a simple thing: capture the job, cost code and receipt at the moment of purchase, while the person who made it still remembers why.
The solution: code the purchase before the cardholder leaves the counter
Speedchain is a vertical card solution. While general purpose cards like Ramp and Brex are built to manage corporate expenses, Speedchain is purpose-built to handle the complexities of construction accounting; project cost codes and cost types, construction ERP depth, multiple jobsites, and more. The company’s focus specifically on the built environment allows it to solve their customer’s biggest expense management problems and go deeper on custom features than general purpose cards.
Speedchain issues commercial cards with construction-specific controls. The receipt workflow builds on that:
A cardholder makes a purchase on their Speedchain card.
Within seconds, they get a text message asking for a photo of the receipt.
They reply with the photo. Speedchain reads the receipt and matches it to the card transaction.
Speedchain suggests the most likely job and cost code.
The worker confirms with a one-number reply, or corrects it.
The confirmed coding writes back to the transaction, and the receipt is kept in the Speedchain platform for audit.
The whole loop takes around 30 seconds once a receipt is submitted.
Why a text message? Field crews are rarely at a computer, and app adoption in the field is hard. A text needs no install and no login, and it works on any phone with a signal.
Why ask the cardholder to confirm? Construction coding depends on context a system can’t always see: two active jobs at the same supply house, a crew lending a card, a project name typed three different ways. The cardholder confirms in one reply, which keeps the data accurate without making them fill out a form.
How the suggestion works
Speedchain leverages an agentic workflow supported by a scoring algorithm to rank likely job and cost coding using:
• the cardholder’s purchase history,
• the cardholders coding history,
• The merchant details and transaction type
When the cardholder replies with the receipt, the agent sends back ranked coding options to confirm. Coding is always completed on the Speedchain platform. If the cardholder doesn't confirm an accurate code, the agent returns a link to code it directly on the platform rather than guessing.
That choice is worth calling out: for financial data, predictable beats clever. A scoring algorithm gives the same answer every time for the same inputs, and when it’s wrong, Speedchain can explain why. After running the LLM based matching logic for several months the acceptance rate for transaction coding was below optimal and required cardholders to manually code transactions. After running this issue through Speedchain’s coding LLMs it was identified that a simpler approach would provide higher match results, and once implemented it quickly showed dramatic improvements. The future version will most likely leverage this matching algorithm, plus a LLM and possibly a custom model to drive optimal match rates.
The solution: code the purchase before the cardholder leaves the counter
Speedchain is a vertical card solution. While general purpose cards like Ramp and Brex are built to manage corporate expenses, Speedchain is purpose-built to handle the complexities of construction accounting; project cost codes and cost types, construction ERP depth, multiple jobsites, and more. The company’s focus specifically on the built environment allows it to solve their customer’s biggest expense management problems and go deeper on custom features than general purpose cards.
Speedchain issues commercial cards with construction-specific controls. The receipt workflow builds on that:
A cardholder makes a purchase on their Speedchain card.
Within seconds, they get a text message asking for a photo of the receipt.
They reply with the photo. Speedchain reads the receipt and matches it to the card transaction.
Speedchain suggests the most likely job and cost code.
The worker confirms with a one-number reply, or corrects it.
The confirmed coding writes back to the transaction, and the receipt is kept in the Speedchain platform for audit.
The whole loop takes around 30 seconds once a receipt is submitted.
Why a text message? Field crews are rarely at a computer, and app adoption in the field is hard. A text needs no install and no login, and it works on any phone with a signal.
Why ask the cardholder to confirm? Construction coding depends on context a system can’t always see: two active jobs at the same supply house, a crew lending a card, a project name typed three different ways. The cardholder confirms in one reply, which keeps the data accurate without making them fill out a form.
How the suggestion works
Speedchain leverages an agentic workflow supported by a scoring algorithm to rank likely job and cost coding using:
• the cardholder’s purchase history,
• the cardholders coding history,
• The merchant details and transaction type
When the cardholder replies with the receipt, the agent sends back ranked coding options to confirm. Coding is always completed on the Speedchain platform. If the cardholder doesn't confirm an accurate code, the agent returns a link to code it directly on the platform rather than guessing.
That choice is worth calling out: for financial data, predictable beats clever. A scoring algorithm gives the same answer every time for the same inputs, and when it’s wrong, Speedchain can explain why. After running the LLM based matching logic for several months the acceptance rate for transaction coding was below optimal and required cardholders to manually code transactions. After running this issue through Speedchain’s coding LLMs it was identified that a simpler approach would provide higher match results, and once implemented it quickly showed dramatic improvements. The future version will most likely leverage this matching algorithm, plus a LLM and possibly a custom model to drive optimal match rates.
How it’s built on AWS
Speedchain has built on fully managed, serverless Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) services from day one, so a lean engineering team can ship features without running servers.
• Transactions: Amazon DynamoDB holds the transaction record, and a new card transaction kicks off the receipt workflow.
• Workflow: Incoming texts and receipt photos from Twilio land in an Amazon SQS queue, and AWS Lambda picks them up and runs the business logic, including the scoring algorithm.
• Messaging: Speedchain works with Twilio for the text-message experience; inbound and outbound texts run through Twilio’s messaging gateway.
• Receipts: images are stored in Amazon S3 for audit, and Amazon Textract reads the receipt text that feeds the scoring algorithm.
• Accounting sync: Sage Intacct, Sage 300 CRE, Spectrum, Viewpoint Vista, Acumatica, QuickBooks Desktop, and QuickBooks Online. In addition, Speedchain’s custom-built Flex solution supports non-connected accounting software.
• Security: because this is payment data, Speedchain uses Amazon Cognito for sign-in, AWS WAF to protect its APIs, and Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection. Speedchain also worked with AWS on a security assessment of its environment.
Working with AWS
Speedchain and AWS first proved the workflow in a proof of concept: could a text-message loop get a field team member from a receipt photo to the right job and cost code? That proof of concept shaped what Speedchain took to production, including the decision to keep a person in the loop. Working with AWS helped Speedchain identify the right technologies to bring the receipt agent to production. In some cases, building on AWS let Speedchain trial new technologies to quickly identify solutions that could be ruled out and allow focus on what would ultimately make the launch successful.
How it’s built on AWS
Speedchain has built on fully managed, serverless Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) services from day one, so a lean engineering team can ship features without running servers.
• Transactions: Amazon DynamoDB holds the transaction record, and a new card transaction kicks off the receipt workflow.
• Workflow: Incoming texts and receipt photos from Twilio land in an Amazon SQS queue, and AWS Lambda picks them up and runs the business logic, including the scoring algorithm.
• Messaging: Speedchain works with Twilio for the text-message experience; inbound and outbound texts run through Twilio’s messaging gateway.
• Receipts: images are stored in Amazon S3 for audit, and Amazon Textract reads the receipt text that feeds the scoring algorithm.
• Accounting sync: Sage Intacct, Sage 300 CRE, Spectrum, Viewpoint Vista, Acumatica, QuickBooks Desktop, and QuickBooks Online. In addition, Speedchain’s custom-built Flex solution supports non-connected accounting software.
• Security: because this is payment data, Speedchain uses Amazon Cognito for sign-in, AWS WAF to protect its APIs, and Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection. Speedchain also worked with AWS on a security assessment of its environment.
Working with AWS
Speedchain and AWS first proved the workflow in a proof of concept: could a text-message loop get a field team member from a receipt photo to the right job and cost code? That proof of concept shaped what Speedchain took to production, including the decision to keep a person in the loop. Working with AWS helped Speedchain identify the right technologies to bring the receipt agent to production. In some cases, building on AWS let Speedchain trial new technologies to quickly identify solutions that could be ruled out and allow focus on what would ultimately make the launch successful.
Results
Transactions are typically submitted and coded within 10 minutes of a purchase being made. When a cardholder texts back their receipt immediately, the loop takes around 30 seconds.
Cardholders’ texted transactions were coded a median of 4.1 days sooner than the ones they didn’t text (21 hours vs. 5.0 days)
Customers are already seeing results: One Speedchain customer cut the time their accounting team spent on expense entry by 50% and is projected to save over $40,000 annually in combined labor costs using Speedchain AI receipt agent. Another, O’Brien Construction, cut its month-end close time by 60%.
When field purchases are coded at the counter instead of at month-end:
• Field operators stop rebuilding receipts at the end of the month.
• Project managers see spend against budget while there’s still time to act.
• Finance posts transactions with the job, cost code and receipt already attached.
What’s next
Visibility is also a control. Speedchain is exploring a policy agent that flags out-of-policy spend as it happens. The idea comes from a pattern construction leaders know well: most people behave when they know someone is watching, and a lot of spend goes sideways when no one is.
Results
Transactions are typically submitted and coded within 10 minutes of a purchase being made. When a cardholder texts back their receipt immediately, the loop takes around 30 seconds.
Cardholders’ texted transactions were coded a median of 4.1 days sooner than the ones they didn’t text (21 hours vs. 5.0 days)
Customers are already seeing results: One Speedchain customer cut the time their accounting team spent on expense entry by 50% and is projected to save over $40,000 annually in combined labor costs using Speedchain AI receipt agent. Another, O’Brien Construction, cut its month-end close time by 60%.
When field purchases are coded at the counter instead of at month-end:
• Field operators stop rebuilding receipts at the end of the month.
• Project managers see spend against budget while there’s still time to act.
• Finance posts transactions with the job, cost code and receipt already attached.
What’s next
Visibility is also a control. Speedchain is exploring a policy agent that flags out-of-policy spend as it happens. The idea comes from a pattern construction leaders know well: most people behave when they know someone is watching, and a lot of spend goes sideways when no one is.
About Speedchain
Speedchain is the AI-native fintech platform for construction. Speedchain automates spending, payment, and accounting workflows to save contractors time and money on every job. The platform gives contractors greater visibility, control, and intelligence across company spend by connecting vendors and merchants with structured financial data and agentic workflows built for construction. Through Speedchain Advantage, customers also gain access to global and industry-specific rewards and discounts.
About Speedchain
Speedchain is the AI-native fintech platform for construction. Speedchain automates spending, payment, and accounting workflows to save contractors time and money on every job. The platform gives contractors greater visibility, control, and intelligence across company spend by connecting vendors and merchants with structured financial data and agentic workflows built for construction. Through Speedchain Advantage, customers also gain access to global and industry-specific rewards and discounts.
