How Boston's Leading Sheet Metal Contractor Modernized Operations with Miter

Company Overview

McCusker-Gill is a commercial HVAC sheet metal contractor and proud SMACNA member, serving the Boston area since 1992. The company operates as a union shop, and specializes in complex healthcare and education projects. Recent examples include Mass General Hospital, Moderna facilities, the new Encore (Wynn) Casino, and the New Balance flagship store in Boston. Still family-owned and operated, McCusker-Gill has grown steadily over three decades while preserving a close-knit culture grounded in loyalty and shared values.

As second-generation leaders at McCusker-Gill, Stephanie Gill Steele, VP of Finance and Human Resources, and Christine Gill Verrochi, Controller, grew up with the business. Today, they’re doing more than helping run the company their dad founded – they’re modernizing it for its next era of growth and success. 

The Challenge

Like many well-established businesses, McCusker-Gill relied on processes and tools that had worked well for decades. But as the company grew and projects became more complex, cracks began to show – especially in payroll, union reporting, and workforce management.

Payroll took over a day and a half each week. Reports had to be manually assembled. Employee documents lived in filing cabinets. Even routine updates – like checking PTO or changing withholdings – required a call to HR. It was clear the company needed more scalable systems.

Christine and Stephanie made the strategic decision to implement two cloud-based systems to bring McCusker-Gill into the modern era: Sage Intacct for accounting and Miter for workforce operations.

Miter now handles time tracking, payroll, compliance, and HR – while syncing data back into Sage Intacct to power more accurate job costing and financial reporting.

Building a Real HR Function from the Ground Up

When Stephanie stepped into her new role as VP of Finance and Human Resources, she took on the challenge of creating a formal HR department – something McCusker-Gill had never had.

Going digital has also helped reduce risk and stay ahead of compliance issues. The team is using Miter to collect and track union licenses and welding certifications, ensuring that no one shows up to a job site with an expired credential.

Empowering Employees with Self-Serve Tools

Miter has made it easy for employees to do things themselves, without needing help from HR or payroll. Employees can now do the following from a single mobile app:

• Check sick, vacation, and PTO balances
• Clock in and out of jobs or the shop
• Upload certifications
• Change tax withholdings
• View pay stubs
• Access tax documents

To keep the team informed, McCusker-Gill also uses Miter’s broadcast message feature to send real-time updates and reminders directly to employees’ phones. “Now, we can send out a blast right from our computer,” shares Christine. “It’s been a huge help, especially when we need to remind people to renew things like their sheet metal licenses.”

Cloud based tools have been a game changer. “With our legacy system, you couldn’t access anything unless you were sitting at your desktop,” says Stehanie. “But with Miter and Intacct, our project managers can be in a meeting and say, ‘I need to write a change order because I’ve got X amount of overtime on this job’ – and they have that information right at their fingertips. They don’t need us to pull it, and they don’t need to be at their desk.”

Streamlined Time Tracking & Union Payroll

With over 300 union field employees and 50 in the shop, capturing time and running payroll was a complex and time-consuming weekly task for the business.

Before Miter, foremen submitted crew hours in Excel. Shop workers used handwritten time cards. Payroll was then manually entered line-by-line, job-by-job, and cost code-by-cost code. The process took a day and a half every week. 

“It was a pretty intensive process,” said Christine. “You’re printing, reviewing, tracking people down for clarification, and manually entering everything. We were always racing the clock to hit our payroll deadline.”

Today, the entire workflow is handled in Miter for all three payrolls: field, shop, and office. Field hours are submitted digitally. Shop employees clock in via phone or kiosk. Expenses are uploaded via the app. Unapproved overtime is flagged automatically. 

Union reporting and certified payroll reports are also simpler. “It’s much easier to download and export the reports we need,” said Christine. “We used to build everything manually in Excel and have to match up the columns – now it’s just a few clicks.”

Precision Job Costing

In the past, reconciling their WIP reports and P&L was a time-consuming process that didn’t always yield clean results. The team used estimated burden rates to approximate fully-burdened labor costs, but this was challenging in an industry where labor fluctuates month-to-month.

Simplified Taxes

Tax document management has been a huge time-saver for Stephanie and the team. For the past 10 years, they handled quarterly filings, processed weekly tax payments, and printed and mailed every W-2 and 1095-C by hand.

“We would be stapling four-page forms, stuffing envelopes, tracking postage – it was hours and hours of work every year,” she said. “I’m so excited that Miter is taking it over.”

And it didn’t stop there. Dozens of employees would misplace their tax documents each year, creating another time-consuming task.

“Someone would lose their W-2 from two years ago, and I’d have to dig it out of a file, make a copy, and securely re-mail it,” Stephanie added. “That alone took up a surprising amount of time.”

Now, employees can access tax documents and update their own withholdings directly in Miter – no calls or paperwork required.

Adopting a new system after decades on legacy software can be daunting, but Christine and Stephanie say the transition to Miter felt like a true partnership.

Rather than forcing McCusker-Gill to adapt to rigid workflows, Miter offered flexibility – and a team dedicated to solving problems alongside them. 

“If something wasn’t built to do exactly what we needed, our launch manager would help us find a way,” said Stephanie. “That made a huge difference.”

Over time, the team became confident managing the system themselves.

Christine and Stephanie are helping McCusker-Gill honor its roots while evolving for the future – building stronger systems, increasing visibility, and empowering their workforce. 

“We’ve come a long way from where we were just a few years ago – still doing things the way they’d always been done,” Stephanie shared. “Modernizing the business hasn’t always been easy, but it’s absolutely been worth it. With tools like Miter in place, we’re more efficient, more informed, and better positioned for what’s next.”