Case study
A 10-person NYC general contractor trading paper timesheets and manual re-entry for a system that runs itself.
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Meet the Client
E.J. York, Inc. is a general contracting and construction management firm founded in 1989 and headquartered in the Bronx, with an office in Manhattan's Financial District. The company handles both large-scale renovation contracts and day-to-day service and maintenance calls across the NYC boroughs, covering interior commercial build-outs, custom apartment buildings, hotels, luxury retail, and facade work. E.J. York runs lean: roughly 10 employees, with field headcount flexing up to 10 to 12 workers when running five or six full gut renovations at once. Non-union, NYC-based, and actively expanding.
"I feel like it's such a powerful tool. These small stepping stones, I know it's a work towards something much bigger, and I'm really excited about it."
Kaitlyn Phillips
Owner / Office Manager, E.J. York
Challenge
Before Trayd, field crews at E.J. York filled out paper timesheets by hand and emailed photos of them to the office. Office Manager Kaitlyn Phillips manually re-entered every hour, job by job, into QuickBooks Desktop. On a good week that took 30 minutes. On a typical one, it took longer.
“It's really been the guys filling out their paper timesheets and emailing me a picture of it. But we've found some issues — they don't fill out the timesheet daily, so they don't remember where they were. Sometimes they'll copy each other's timesheets, which of course leads to invoicing issues, job costing, everything of that nature.”
Kaitlyn Phillips
Owner / Office Manager, E.J. York
The paperwork problem went beyond payroll. New hire onboarding meant physically chasing employees for signed documents. Sick and PTO requests came in by text with no system of record. With workers visiting multiple job sites in a single day, and the office often unable to verify where anyone actually was, job costing was nearly impossible to keep current.
The back-office burden was significant enough that it shaped which jobs E.J. York would even bid. Certified payroll and municipal contract work stayed off the table because of the compliance overhead they would add to a process already at capacity.
“I've steered away from a lot of municipality work at the moment just because of that back-office stuff. It's a lot of work.”
Kaitlyn Phillips
Owner / Office Manager, E.J. York
The solution
E.J. York started with the fundamentals: getting field workers clocking in and out digitally, and getting payroll off paper entirely. From there, each layer of the back office followed. Their HR partner, Utopia HR Solutions, was brought into Trayd to manage onboarding and compliance in parallel, giving Kaitlyn visibility into where each new hire stood without chasing anyone down. Field adoption took deliberate effort, including a small bonus and incentive program tied to consistent clock-in/out behavior, but it worked.
Mobile clock in and out with geolocation, replacing paper timesheets and photo emails
Digital employee onboarding through the app, including document collection and I-9s
PTO and time off requests in the app, replacing informal texts to the office
Reimbursement workflow, received well by field employees
Utopia HR Solutions integrated as a parallel user for compliance and policy management
The Results
Payroll went from something Kaitlyn had to block off time for to something she runs standing at her desk on the way out the door.
"I'm literally running payroll standing at my desk two minutes before I'm running out to get to the next thing. Last time, I was like, I'm running payroll, nobody speak to me. A half hour was the quickest I could ever get it down to. And now it's down to like a couple of minutes."
Kaitlyn Phillips
Owner / Office Manager, E.J. York
Payroll run time dropped from ~30 minutes to 2 minutes per cycle
71% of shifts are now entered directly by the field, rather than re-keyed by the back office.
New hire documents and onboarding visible live in the app, no physical paperwork chase
Support response consistently under an hour; one issue resolved in minutes with no action required from Kaitlyn
Reimbursement workflow adopted smoothly by field employees
The clock-in/out incentive program helped drive field adoption and day-to-day compliance
"I feel like it's such a powerful tool. These small stepping stones, I know it's a work towards something much bigger, and I'm really excited about it."
Kaitlyn Phillips
Owner / Office Manager, E.J. York