Pylon Building Group LLC is a full-service general contractor headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, and founded in 2023 by Reggie, a former Auburn University and New York Giants football player. Pylon originally operated as a subsidiary of Brasfield & Gorrie and became an independent company effective January 2026. The company employs 25 people, spanning field crews, project management, and a 20-person office and HR function, with field crews split evenly between English and Spanish speakers.

In its first two years, Pylon focused on ground-up office buildings and event spaces for nonprofit organizations, while positioning itself to compete for federally funded projects and corporate construction contracts in the region.  Pylon's leadership has treated back-office infrastructure as a strategic priority alongside project delivery. Building a scalable payroll, time-tracking, and HR foundation was seen as the necessary groundwork for the company Pylon intended to become.

The Challenge

Pylon's workforce systems- one for salaried employee time tracking, another for field and hourly time tracking, a dedicated payroll processor, and a standalone HR management platform- had all been inherited through its former parent company. As Pylon began working toward operating independently, it needed a single platform that could house all of these functions together, rather than four systems that had never been built to work with each other.

Every payroll cycle required pulling data from two separate time-tracking systems, normalizing it, and manually uploading it to the payroll processor. Any change to an employee's information had to be replicated by hand across multiple platforms, creating an ongoing risk of data drift and administrative overhead that scaled poorly.

Pylon was also relying on Brasfield & Gorrie's payroll infrastructure for support, a dependency that made sense in the company's earliest days but did not fit its goal of operating as a fully independent entity.

As Alina Croft (Pylon’s Project Operations Manager) put it, Pylon was "still relying on our parent company for those services, which caused a disconnect, because they were getting onboarded through Brasfield, but they were Pylon employees."

Perhaps the most operationally significant issue was a lag between when field time was submitted and when it showed up in job cost reports. For a general contractor, knowing labor costs against specific projects in near real time is fundamental to managing margins and staying ahead of budget overruns.

Beyond the systems themselves, Pylon faced workforce-level challenges. Field crews resisted using smartphones for time tracking regardless of native language, and the existing toolset had no Spanish-language option.

Pylon's HR team, meanwhile, had a 20-person function but no scalable applicant tracking system suited to a growing contractor. Its existing HR platform was built for enterprise scale, not for a two-year-old company trying to professionalize its hiring process ahead of pursuing federal and corporate work. And because federally funded construction projects require certified payroll under the Davis-Bacon Act, Pylon needed a payroll platform with a credible path to that capability, something its existing payroll processor could not offer.

Why Pylon Building Group Chose Lumber

Pylon's evaluation of Lumber began at the CFMA Southeastern Regional Conference. Pylon was evaluating Lumber for workforce management at the same time it was implementing Sage Intacct as its ERP system through its partner. These two evaluations ran in parallel, and Lumber's existing, bidirectional Sage Intacct integration became central to the decision.

Having the integration was table stakes; proving it worked reliably in practice was what actually differentiated Lumber during the sales process.

Coordinating three parties on a single implementation, Pylon, Lumber, and Bangert on Sage, often slows projects down. "Everyone approached the implementations as a team," Croft said, adding that she never once heard one side tell Pylon to go ask the other because something fell outside its scope of work.

During the evaluation process, Lumber’s several specific capabilities stood out -

• Lumber's manual override function, which lets administrators enter time on behalf of workers, addressed concerns about field crews who might resist or forget to clock in on a smartphone.
• Lumber’s native Spanish-language support addressed a real communication gap for Pylon's field workforce.
• Lumber's certified payroll capability gave Pylon a credible path toward federal contract eligibility, something its existing payroll provider could not support.
• Lumber's ATS and onboarding tools offered the professional, construction-appropriate hiring infrastructure vital to Pylon's growing enterprise.

The Solution

Lumber’s time tracking implementation was designed around Pylon's actual field conditions rather than requiring crews to change how they work. It includes color-coded time entry, GPS location stamping, cost code and job type tagging, break and overtime rules, a gamification module, manual admin override for workers who cannot or will not use the mobile app, and native Spanish-language support.

On the payroll side, Lumber took on full processing responsibility, including on-cycle and off-cycle runs, multi-state wages, overtime, certified payroll, quarterly and annual tax filings, garnishments, and direct deposit. Pylon confirmed that Lumber would handle all payroll tax filings directly, with only 401(k) contributions requiring manual fund movement outside the platform.

Rather than manually re-entering employee data, Lumber's implementation team handled the migration directly by pulling employee records from Pylon's previous payroll system.

Lumber's connected hiring-to-payroll flow eliminates duplicate paperwork, and a new hire cannot move forward until all required steps are complete, giving Pylon confidence that nothing gets missed along the way.

The Sage Intacct integration syncs bidirectionally every two to four hours, with Lumber pulling project data, cost codes, and employee records from the ERP and pushing approved timesheets and general ledger entries back to the ERP. A daily job cost report provides Pylon's finance team with a regular, dependable view of labor costs across active projects, directly addressing the lag that had been a central concern during the evaluation

Results on the ground

• Payroll Consolidation: Lumber replaced four separate systems with a single platform, eliminating the manual data bridging that payroll processing previously required among two separate time-tracking tools and a standalone payroll processor.
• Faster, Lower-Friction Onboarding: The streamlined employee migration path meant Pylon's team did not need to manually re-enter records for close to 100 employees.
• A Clearer Path to Job Cost Visibility: The Sage Intacct integration's two-to-four-hour sync cycle and daily job cost report were built specifically to close the gap between time entry and cost reporting, which was a core weakness in Pylon's prior setup.
• Compliance Readiness for Growth: Certified payroll capability gives Pylon a foundation to pursue federally funded work under Davis-Bacon requirements, a strategic priority the company could not pursue with its previous payroll provider.
• A Workforce-Ready Field Tool: Native Spanish-language support and manual override functionality were built to match the realities of Pylon's field crews rather than asking those crews to adapt to a rigid system.

The impact of the entire implementation could be felt immediately. Labor charges that once took a couple of weeks to hit a job now post in less than five days after payroll is processed, giving project teams a much faster read on overtime and unplanned labor before it affects a job's projections.