Modernizing the Back Office of the Southeast’s Leading Electrician

Company Overview

Marathon Electrical Contractors isn’t just wiring buildings – they’re powering the growth of the Southeast. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, with additional offices and fabrication facilities across the region, Marathon has become the premier electrician on projects ranging from hospitals and universities to massive data centers for Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google.

“We’re really proud of the reputation we’ve built,” says Brad Sandidge, Marathon’s CFO. “It’s gotten to the point where the call comes in and it’s not up for bid – if it’s close to Marathon, they want us on the job.”

That trust comes from a relentless focus on quality and timeliness. “These businesses want their facilities up and running so they can make money,” explains Brad. “Finishing on time while maintaining quality is everything, and we deliver on that.”

But behind the impressive project list is an equally important commitment to people. Marathon recently became 100% employee-owned through an ESOP and runs its own three-year apprenticeship program with more than 140 current participants. “We believe in developing people so they see this as a career, not just a job,” Brad explains. “And since we’re employee-owned, if you stick around here, you retire with something meaningful.”

The Challenge

Marathon’s decision to upgrade from Sage 300 to Sage Intacct wasn’t about payroll, it was about modernizing the business. Still, they knew the entire migration hinged on getting payroll right.

“When we converted to Sage Intacct, payroll was make-or-break,” Brad recalls. “If the payroll didn’t work, we weren’t going to do it.”

The Marathon team had been happy with Sage 300’s payroll solution, but they found that Sage Intacct’s payroll didn’t meet their needs. “We started to dig into it and said, this won’t work,” Brad explains. “That’s when the rep introduced us to Miter.”

At the same time, the payroll team was stretched to the breaking point. “I could see the stress,” says Brad. “They never felt like they could go on vacation.”

“We were maxed out,” remembers Morgan, Marathon’s Payroll Manager. “We spoke with Brad – if we were going to continue down this path, we’d need to hire someone else. And thinking about training someone new on top of our workload scared me.”

With 600 employees at the time and plans to hire 200 more, the stakes were only getting higher.

The Solution

Once Brad and Morgan saw Miter, the advantages were clear. “You can tell Miter is built by people who understand construction,” Brad says. “They know Davis-Bacon. They know job costing. They know the details that matter to a business like ours.”

Payroll Compliance

Payroll compliance had long been one of the most time-consuming responsibilities of Marathon’s back office. “Before, we took care of all the monthly and quarterly compliance reporting with the state and the federal government to make sure that the deposits were being made with the various governmental institutions,” Brad explains. “Miter took that off our plate.”

Certified payroll reporting, once painfully manual, is now almost instant. “The Miter system is far and away better than what we were doing before,” Brad says.

Morgan feels the difference daily: “It was getting harder to keep up with all the different requirements for each state and the different executive orders they’d put out on these certified jobs. Now, I know our reports are compliant and that gives me real peace of mind.”

Cloud Access

One of the biggest changes was moving off servers and into the cloud. “Being able to have a cloud-based product instead of one sitting on our servers gives us mobility and access,” Brad says. “It’s a more modernized system, and it’s allowed people to work remotely.”

Morgan agrees: “I love that I can log in anywhere. If something happens while I’m at home or even on vacation, I can get in and fix it. With our old system, that wasn’t possible.”

Easier for the team

With more than 800 employees and 500 contracted workers scattered across 100+ job sites, ease of use is critical. Miter makes it easy for Marathon’s 1,300 workers to access pay stubs and update personal information.

“Click a button, and employees get an email or a text each week that says, ‘you got paid,’” explains Brad. They can click on it and instantly see their pay stubs. They can also go in and change their own information.”

Communication has also improved dramatically with Miter’s SMS messaging feature.

That includes coordinating training and company updates: “When we bring 800 employees together in Birmingham for safety and other trainings, we’re able to communicate through Miter’s text messaging system,” Brad describes. If we need to get a message out about the convention – boom, just send it through. We didn’t have that capability before.”

Morgan adds that her team relies on Miter’s SMS messaging too: “If we need something from an employee, we can text them right from Miter. They respond faster, and problems get solved quicker.”

Reporting & Job Costing

For Brad, reporting is where Miter shines the brightest.

That flexibility is crucial for job costing. Marathon has thousands of different cost codes since they track them down to the task. “Miter posts a journal entry for us with all the job costs, which is often thousands and thousands of lines,” Brad says. “If we see something wrong once it gets into our general ledger, we can undo it. We just go back into Miter and fix it, and then repost it. It’s like the first entry never happened, which is really nice. It keeps the data clean and our fully-burdened labor costs accurate.”

Errors have dropped dramatically as well. “We used to do 30 or 40 ‘second checks’ in a week,” Brad says. “Now we’re doing less than 10. That’s because of a better process and a better system with Miter.”

Morgan sees the same impact: “Now we’re catching mistakes before we even post the payroll. Where before I’d be getting emails Thursday morning saying, ‘my check’s wrong,’ now we catch those in advance.”

Unified Systems

Before Miter, Marathon relied on a patchwork of separate systems for recruiting, onboarding, reimbursements, HR, and payroll. Now, it all lives in one place that syncs seamlessly with their ERP.

Managing both recruiting and onboarding in Miter has cut down on manual data entry. “Since recruiting and onboarding is built into Miter, all the info that’s collected in the recruiting process is automatically fed into the system if the employee is hired,” Brad explains. “That’s created a real efficiency for us.”

Reimbursements are simpler now that they’re processed through the same platform as payroll. “We used to have that go through our AP system,” Brad recalls. “Employees would fill out a piece of paper, submit it, AP would process it once a week, and send a check. Now expenses are run through Miter and get automatically deposited into employees’ accounts.”

And because Miter integrates directly with Sage Intacct, payroll and workforce data flow straight into their ERP, fueling accurate reporting and job costing, and removing the need for manual spreadsheets.

Conclusion

For Marathon, the decision to modernize their back office wasn’t just about keeping up with growth; it was about giving their people the tools to succeed. Today, payroll, compliance, recruiting, onboarding, reimbursements, and reporting all live in one integrated system.

Morgan sees the difference every day. “Miter is just user-friendly,” she says. “When I train someone new, it’s so much easier for them to understand why we do things the way we do. With the old system, I’d still be explaining things months later. Now, it just clicks.”

“With our old system, I felt like we were in the dinosaur age,” Morgan continues. “I’d be showing someone how to do something and just laugh at how backwards it was. Now, the flow in Miter just makes sense.”

The impact is both human and financial. Marathon now runs weekly payroll for more than 1,300 workers with just two people. Despite managing payroll for more than twice as many employees as when they bought Miter, they haven’t needed to add, headcount to the payroll team. Errors are dramatically reduced, compliance is automated, and communication reaches employees wherever they are.

Looking back, Brad reflects on how the journey began.