Cobex Construction Group has helped more than 3,000 customers with home exterior installations like roofing, siding, and solar panels. The company prides itself on hiring talented employees to deliver quality work on every house. But what worked for managing a smaller team wasn’t cutting it as the business grew. 

“We didn’t really have anything HR,” said Marina Dallakyan, Cobex’s Head of HR and Finance. The company stored physical files of employee information, tax forms, and paystubs in cabinets and relied on a third-party accounting firm to help run payroll. “It was just ‘here’s your paperwork, fill it out, we’ll put it in this filing cabinet,’ and that’s kind of it,” she said. “Things would go missing and if admins weren’t in the office, employees would have no idea where to get information.”

In addition to a more modern HR system, Cobex also needed better tools to help keep costs in check and hit revenue targets. “We’re growing a lot and trying to become more efficient,” Marina said. “That meant looking for software to help with our job costing, profitability, and reporting.”

Cobex ditched filing cabinets and joined Rippling for its HRIS and Payroll. The company now uses a suite of HR and finance tools across the all-in-one platform to improve the employee experience, reduce administrative work, and drive the business forward. 

“Rippling takes away those mundane tasks that none of us wants to do and provides a better environment where people get to do more creative work," Marina said.

Rippling takes away those mundane tasks that none of us wants to do and provides a better environment where people get to do more creative work

Marina Dallakyan

Head of HR and Finance at Cobex Construction Group

With Rippling, Cobex brought Payroll, Time & Attendance, and Expense Management under the same interconnected system. 

For employees, that means easy access to needed resources from a single app. “They can clock in and out, request time off, view their paystubs, see breakdowns of the jobs they worked, and submit expense reimbursements from one place,” Marina said. “The construction employees don’t want 10 million apps on their phone. Rippling makes things really convenient.”

For admins and supervisors, Rippling’s one-stop shop means access to workflows that save time and help the company stay on top of important deadlines. For instance, the platform can automatically route expenses, hours, and time off to the right manager for approval, remind those managers when their approvals are due, and incorporate approvals into payroll. “We really don’t need a large team to manage everything since it’s all running so smoothly,” Marina said.

According to Marina, Rippling Payroll is a huge step up from its prior process of outsourcing tasks to a third party firm. “Having someone here trying to manage payroll, then sending it over to an accounting firm involved multiple people and systems. It complicated things,” she said. “Having a payroll software where approved hours, expenses, and mileage tracking automatically flows through really simplifies things. You don’t miss as much.”

Marina and her team also configured Cobex’s PTO policies directly into payroll. She can even upload CSV files to pay out commissions instead of manually entering in data.

Construction companies need to quickly log detailed on-the-job expenses—like hours worked, overtime accrued, and miles driven—for every project in their accounting books. According to Marina, swift job costing allows them to gauge their work’s progress and report revenue. 

With Rippling’s job costing , Cobex can quickly allocate hours and expenses to every project. This allows the company to catch unforeseen costs, like a longer-than-expected drive to a worksite or complexities with a house’s roof, so it can submit a change order to customers and recoup some of its losses. It also helps Cobex spot overtime upticks and adjust calendars to keep costs in check.  

Cobex set Rippling’s Time & Attendance to remind construction employees to take legally required meal breaks after they’ve worked a certain amount of hours. And if they forget to clock back in after one, Rippling automatically handles it for them. Now, employees know when they can take their break, while the company can maintain compliance with labor laws.

Rippling also sped up Cobex’s onboarding process, making it easier for new hires to sign required documents and complete background checks. “On their first day, we can focus on getting them ready for their actual job, instead of handling a bunch of paperwork,” Marina said. 

• An all-in-one tech stack: With Rippling, Cobex can track time and attendance, reimburse expenses, and run payroll from a single platform.
• Streamlined job costing: Cobex can quickly map every cost for every job to its accounting books, helping the company better report revenue and track progress of its projects.
• Time-saving automations: Rippling workflows automatically route time-off and expense approvals to the right managers and remind construction employees to take meal breaks.