From 3 hours to 1 hour per month preparing data for the accountant, and per-site margins finally visible.

Biemme Costruzioni is a construction company based in San Raffaele Cimena, near Turin, working on building sites and time-and-materials jobs with a team of 7 people. It is led by Ernesto, the owner, who follows both day-to-day operations and the financial side of every job closely. As in many small construction firms, the issue wasn't just "doing the books" — it was being able to reconstruct exactly what was happening on each site: hours, materials, days worked, documents and margins.

Before archim, site reports were handled in a fragmented way. Ernesto noted some things in Excel, reconstructed others from memory three or four days later, and got the rest from his crew in incomplete or inconsistent formats. In some cases a worker wouldn't even hand in a report, and Ernesto had to figure out the work done "a bit on his own", cross-referencing his notes with his calendar and what he could remember. The result, in his own words, was simple: "Site reports were a real mess." The most frustrating part wasn't only the lost time, but how unreliable the final picture was. One person logged 5 hours, another 3, an absence appeared as attendance, a public holiday ended up marked as worked. All of this forced Ernesto into constant verification and reconstruction work. At month-end, preparing the data to send to the accountant took about three hours. Not a huge amount of time in absolute terms, but high-friction time: scattered, repetitive, and with a much higher margin of error than necessary. But the deeper issue wasn't even that. The real limitation was that Biemme had no clear read on the profitability of its sites. When people asked Ernesto what margin he had made on a job, the answer was often uncertain. The company worked, delivered, invoiced — but without a sharp view of how much each project was really earning.

The decision to adopt archim came from exactly that need: understanding the real profit margin on each site. Then, as time went on, the value of the digital site report and time tracking became more and more obvious. Going live took about two months. The site report was picked up quickly inside the company; the slow part wasn't convincing people, but waiting for a project that could be followed end-to-end inside the system. With jobs already in progress, it was hard to read the full picture. Once that phase was over, the change became very tangible. Today the crew fills in their reports straight from their phones. If someone forgets to log two days, Ernesto notices immediately. Information no longer arrives late or in random forms — it's recorded as the work happens.

The first result is operational. The work that used to take about three hours at month-end to prepare the accountant's data now takes about one hour. "In my view we've recovered two-thirds of the time: where I used to spend three hours, now it's one." The second result is control. Site reports, which used to be a constant source of guesswork and doubt, are today "perfect across the board." Data no longer slips out of his hands, and when he needs to cross-reference hours, materials and sites, the picture is available straight away. The third result, for Biemme, is perhaps the most important: a clear economic read on each project. Today Ernesto sees sites with 30% margins, others at 12%, others as low as 5%. He can spot the ones where "we just moved money around" and the ones where the work really pays. This has already changed how Biemme picks its job mix: less time spent on activities that depend too much on third parties, more focus on work where the company is strong and profitable. There's also a very practical benefit on time-and-materials jobs. When an invoice has to be prepared for a client, Ernesto picks the days worked and archim returns the total hours, the amount, the type of work and the related materials. A step that used to be cumbersome is now instant. The document side has improved sharply too. In a single month Biemme handled 112 delivery notes. Not all of them arrive correctly classified, but in about an hour and a half Ernesto can route them all to the right site, keeping reporting precise.