How a 12-Person MEP Firm Gained Visibility and Cut Hours of Admin With Factor

Factor replaced RCE’s limited QuickBooks setup with a modern, engineering-specific platform that delivers clarity, efficiency, and real project control.

Industry

Engineering

Company Size

Location

Ames, IA

Key Results

Major Time Savings

RCE cuts 8+ hours every week across PM prep, timesheets, approvals, and scheduled revenue, freeing partners and PMs to focus on billable work.

Clear Project Visibility

Factor replaces QuickBooks’ blind spots with instant insight into project health, helping the team catch issues early and see exactly where time is going.

Faster, Confident Decision-Making

With easy access to historical data and real-time Pulse dashboards, the team builds proposals faster and makes better calls on staffing, budgets, and workload.

Lower Cost, Higher Impact

Factor delivers powerful project management at a fraction of the cost (about 1/10th of Deltek) with responsive support and tools that fit how engineers actually work.

Overview

Resource Consulting Engineers (RCE) is a 12-person mechanical engineering firm with offices in Ames, IA, and Omaha, NE. With a strong reputation across higher education, K–12 schools, and technical infrastructure projects, the firm has steadily grown through repeat clients and word-of-mouth.

As workloads increased and project types grew more complex, RCE needed a way to gain real visibility into project health, improve timesheet efficiency, and give project managers the data they needed to lead with confidence. QuickBooks alone wasn't enough.

After evaluating Deltek and others, RCE selected Factor for its affordability, responsiveness, and ability to deliver clear performance insights without the complexity of larger systems.

Challenges

Growing teams and increasingly technical work made it difficult to track performance, manage time, and spot issues early using QuickBooks alone.

Zero Project Visibility in QuickBooks

QuickBooks offered no meaningful performance insights, leaving project managers and leadership without clarity on hours, budgets, or overall project health.

Time-Consuming, Frustrating Timesheets

The team spent excessive time entering weekly hours, creating frustration and wasted effort due to an interface not built for engineering workflows.

Limited Oversight & Hidden Project Roadblocks

There was no easy way to spot stalled projects, missing hours, or team members who were stuck, making it difficult to intervene early or keep work on track.

Unreliable Historical Data for Proposals

Without accessible historical performance data, proposal development relied on guesswork rather than accurate, confidence-building project benchmarks.

Difficulty Managing Multiple Project Managers

Supporting several PMs required more oversight than existing tools allowed, creating inefficiencies and relying too heavily on manual check-ins.

Labor-Intensive Revenue Forecasting

Planning and scheduling future revenue took significant time and effort, making it difficult to understand upcoming workload and financial trajectory.

Solution

Resource Consulting Engineers chose Factor for its simplicity, affordability, and engineering-focused project insights.

Right-Sized for Engineering Firms

Factor delivered the clarity QuickBooks couldn’t, giving RCE real project visibility, intuitive KPIs, and the ability to immediately see when a project or resource was in trouble.

Massive Time Savings Where It Matters

Time entry went from “painful and an hour long” to a quick 20-minute task, saving the team hours every week and paying for Factor on time savings alone.

Responsive, Midwest-Based Support

From early trials to custom configurations, Factor’s team answered every question quickly and reinforced RCE’s confidence that they had chosen the right partner.

Cost-Effective Alternative to Deltek

With Factor priced at one-tenth the cost of Deltek and without the complexity or horror stories, they found a system built for how small engineering teams actually work.

Implementation

Factor’s onboarding helped RCE establish a scalable project management structure while enabling partners and PMs to use the system confidently.

Guided setup during the trial ensured project structures, time entry, and budgets were aligned with RCE’s workflows.
Fast, consistent communication with Factor support helped the team configure dashboards, reports, and revenue scheduling for their unique needs.
Pulse was introduced as the core tool for biweekly PM meetings—allowing partners to filter by project manager and assess each project in minutes.
Scheduled Revenue tools were adopted as Factor improved them, turning a once-laborious, multi-hour task into a quick forecasting exercise.
The simplicity of the system made adoption easy for engineers, freeing leadership to delegate more project oversight.

Conclusion

Factor replaced RCE’s limited QuickBooks setup with a modern, engineering-specific platform that delivers clarity, efficiency, and real project control.

RCE now saves more than eight hours every week, builds proposals with data-driven confidence, catches project issues faster, and holds PMs accountable with clean visibility into their workload. The firm’s partners finally have a scalable system that supports real forecasting, real oversight, and real growth without the cost or complexity of traditional A/E systems.

“QuickBooks gave us nothing. Factor gave us clarity.” — Clint Rabe, Partner

RCE continues to expand its impact across the Midwest with a tool built to grow with them and a team behind it that responds, adapts, and keeps the firm running efficiently.