Hello Maria …
Maria Gonzalez has been running Gonzalez Plumbing & Heating for over a decade. What started as a one-woman operation has grown into a team of 14 — eight field technicians, two office staff, and Maria holding everything together from the front office. They serve residential and commercial clients across the Southwest, completing between 30 and 50 jobs a week depending on the season. By any measure the business was doing well. Booked out weeks in advance, good reputation, repeat customers. The problem was not finding work. The problem was getting paid for it.
▶ Sales Tools: Hubspot Enterprise
▶ Accounting: Quickbooks Online
▶ Payments: Stripe
▶ Team Size: 14
"I'd look at the pipeline and see a full book of work. Then I'd look at the bank account and wonder where it all was."
THE PROBLEM
Every job that Gonzalez Plumbing & Heating completes gets logged in HubSpot. That is where the sales process lives — leads, quotes, jobs, pipeline. QuickBooks Online is where the money lives — invoices, payments, expenses, the books.
The two systems had no connection.
When a job closed in HubSpot, one of Maria's two office staff had to manually create the invoice in QuickBooks and send it to the customer. With 30 to 50 jobs a week coming through that step kept getting deprioritised. Invoices were going out three, five, sometimes ten days after the job was done. And when customers did not pay on time, chasing them was another manual task that fell to whoever had a spare moment — which was rarely anyone.
The result was an average of 52 days between completing a job and collecting the payment. Maria knew the money was there. She could see the closed jobs in HubSpot. She just could not get it to move.
What Carapace did for Maria …
Maria first tried with our pre-loaded sandbox connections she connected HubSpot, QuickBooks Online, and Stripe to Carapace in a single session. She saw Carapace create all the actions, reporting and reconciliation steps. She then went live and connected her live data. Two automations went live in minutes.
The first watches the HubSpot pipeline continuously. The moment a job is marked closed won, Carapace pulls the deal details — customer name, job description, amount — creates the corresponding invoice in QuickBooks, and sends it to the customer immediately. No one in the office touches it. The invoice goes out the same day the job closes, every time.
The second automation handles collections. Every open invoice is monitored against its due date. At seven days overdue Carapace sends the customer a first reminder automatically. At fourteen days a second reminder goes out. At thirty days the invoice is flagged directly to Maria as something that needs her personal attention. Everything before that threshold runs without anyone intervening.
Maria's office staff stopped making collection calls entirely. That time went back into the business.
Payment time dropped from 52 days to 19. I actually have cash flow now.
52→19 days
Within thirty days average payment time had dropped from 52 days to 19. Forty thousand dollars in outstanding invoices — money that existed on paper but had not moved — came in during that first month.
Nothing changed about how Gonzalez Plumbing & Heating runs jobs or manages customers. The field team works exactly as they always have. The only thing that changed was what happens in the 52 days after a job closes. That gap is now 19 days and shrinking.