The Printer in the CFO's Living Room: How Construction Really Buys AP Tech — Eric Pratt

Eric Pratt grew up counting inventory in his family's 100-year-old power tools and machinery business, learning bookkeeping from his grandmother while the rest of his family worked the trades. He spent years selling virtual card and e-payments before joining Viewpoint in 2020, right as they rolled out an e-payments program for Spectrum with barely twenty live customers. Six years later he sits on the Trimble App Exchange team, works closely with fintech partners like EarlyTrade, and calls himself the "AP partner guy." On this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Eric sits down with Rishi Srivastava to unpack how construction finance teams actually buy software, why peer references beat logic every time, and why he thinks AI — the way most teams are using it today — is quietly creating more work at every stage of the funnel. He walks through what App Exchange is really solving as ERPs like Vista and Spectrum evolve, where economy of scale breaks an integration, and why AP managers, not CFOs, are often the ones doing the real selling upward. He tells the story of a COVID-era CFO whose owner leased an industrial printer for her living room so checks could keep flowing, uses it to explain why every "we've always done it this way" objection deserves curiosity rather than judgment, and closes on why reverse-prompting your own Drive to find the bottlenecks is more useful than another chatbot. Topics include:What Trimble App Exchange is really solving as ERPs evolveWhy trust signals — peer references, CFMA presence, live customers you can text mid-demo — beat logic in construction salesVista vs Spectrum: two ERPs, two very different customer personasWhat breaks first when an integration scales from 10 to 400 customersWhy AP managers, not CFOs, are often the real champions — and how to arm them to sell upward"Living in the white space": reading what isn't being said in a status-quo objectionWhich manual back-office behaviors are actually optional now, even if they don't feel like itThe COVID-era CFO who printed checks from her living room — and why accommodation beats judgmentEarlyTrade, dynamic discounting, and why it isn't factoringThe AI paradox: why the tools we're using today are creating more mental work at every stage of the funnelFinance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Beiing Human, AI-powered accounts payable automation for construction contractors.