How Thermal Pipe Shields Closed the Books 6 Days Faster with Sage Expense Management

Thermal Pipe Shields is a Washington-based organization that has grown to become the largest supplier of insulated pipe supports in the nation and a major supplier of mechanical insulation products.

For Controller Paisley Heckman, managing expenses meant keeping corporate card transactions organized, expense records accurate, and payroll and bookkeeping running smoothly.

As the business expanded alongside its sister companies, Jewel Mechanical and Heckman Inc ., expense management quickly became a tedious challenge.

The Challenges

Manual Spreadsheet Tracking

Expense reporting revolved around a Google Sheet maintained entirely by Paisley. Every month, she manually uploaded company card transactions before employees could begin completing their reports.

Chasing Missing Receipts

With Visa purchasing cards and American Express business cards used across the business, finance had little visibility into spending until employees submitted their receipts. Paisley regularly followed up to collect missing documentation before expenses could be reviewed.

Double Data Entry into QuickBooks

Once employees submitted their reports, Paisley manually transferred every expense into QuickBooks Online.

The Transformation

As the company prepared to scale, Thermal Pipe Shields needed a scalable, user-friendly process.

They were looking for:

• Automated corporate card expense tracking
• A direct integration with American Express
• User-friendly platform for employees
• A direct integration with QuickBooks Online

Paisley evaluated several expense management solutions, but most fell short where it mattered most.

Effortless Expense Tracking with American Express

With direct feeds from American Express, every corporate transaction now flows automatically into Sage Expense Management, typically within a day. No more downloading CSVs or tracking expenses manually.

Reconciliation Takes Minutes, Not Hours

Automated coding and reconciliation have dramatically reduced the time the team spends manually entering data every month.

What previously required 8 hours of manual effort now takes only 10 minutes a week.

Rapid Expense Approvals

With Sage Expense Management, review bottlenecks are a thing of the past. Because employees capture receipts and code transactions on the go, the finance team can review and clear submissions almost instantly.

Today, 95% of expense reports are approved within just half a day of submission.

Seamless Sync with QuickBooks

The most immediate impact came during the month-end close.

The time required to close the books has decreased from 7 days per month to 1 day.

The Outcome

After seeing the time savings at Thermal Pipe Shields, Paisley implemented Sage Expense Management across two other businesses, Jewel Mechanical and Heckman Inc.

Today, each company manages expenses independently while benefiting from the same streamlined process, making it easier to scale finance operations as the businesses continue to grow.