---
title: "How a Drywall Contractor Added Up $178K a Year in Expected Savings | Punch"
description: "A drywall subcontractor mapped where Punch would change how they operate and what each change was worth over a year."
canonical: https://buildwithpunch.com/resources/drywall-contractor-business-case
---

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CUSTOMER STORY

# How a drywall contractor added up $178K a year in expected savings.

A drywall subcontractor recently walked the Punch team through the business case for adopting Punch at their company. They didn't want a pitch. They wanted to know if the math worked. Line by line, we mapped where Punch would change how they operate and what each change was worth over a year.

The total came out to **$178,000 per year**, and we kept the assumptions conservative.

## Where the savings came from

Eliminate ordering the wrong materials

$40,000

Reduce overbillings from labor subs

$50,000

Catch project problems earlier, while you can still adjust

$75,000

Eliminate the daily report app they were paying for

$13,000

Total conservative estimate

$178,000

## "$12k of the wrong material in a week"

One line from that conversation captured the problem. The owner said:

> "We ordered $12k of the wrong material last week. 0% chance we would have made that mistake if we were using Punch."

That's the kind of thing manual purchasing produces. Material gets ordered by phone or text, no one cross-checks it against the budget or the [approved materials list](https://buildwithpunch.com/construction-procurement-controls), and by the time it shows up to the job, it's already a problem. Multiply that across a year and a portfolio of projects and you understand where the $40,000 in the table above comes from.

## The story that's hard to forget

The most expensive example they gave wasn't a wrong order. It was a problem nobody caught for months. The painting crew on one of their projects had a spray nozzle break early on. Someone installed a different nozzle and, in the owner's words, the crew was effectively "pressure-washing the walls with paint."

They spent an extra **$60,000 in paint** on that project. Nobody noticed until the job was almost complete and the numbers came in.

What Punch would have caught

With Punch tracking [material orders](https://buildwithpunch.com/product/purchase-orders) against the budget in real time, the issue would have surfaced when the first floor's paint orders blew past their estimate. Punch is now building a feature that goes further: it calculates how much paint _should_ be ordered based on the square footage of drywall already ordered on a project, so anomalies like this get flagged on the first reorder instead of after the project is done.

## Why we share this

Every week the Punch team sits down with contractors who teach us something new about how purchasing actually breaks in the field. The spray-nozzle story turned into a feature on the Punch roadmap. The "$12k wrong material" line turned into how Punch gets explained to other subs. Every conversation makes the product sharper.

If you're trying to build a business case for Punch at your company, this is the kind of math that holds up: a handful of recurring, expensive problems that purchasing software was never designed to solve, and that an AI purchasing agent can.

Want to run the same math for your company?

Tell us what your team does today and we'll walk through where Punch is likely to pay for itself, with no pressure.

Book a working session

KEEP READING

## Related reading

[Customer story

### One Job Walk, One Complete Report

An Atlanta drywall contractor cut daily reports from 30 minutes to 3 with one spoken walkthrough.

Read the story](https://buildwithpunch.com/resources/atlanta-drywall-contractor-daily-reports)[Guide

### Procurement Controls in Construction

Approved-materials lists, approved-supplier lists, and pre-negotiated pricing, all enforced before the PO goes out.

Read guide](https://buildwithpunch.com/construction-procurement-controls)[Guide

### Construction Purchasing Guide

How construction teams buy materials, common problems, modern workflows, and how AI is changing procurement.

Read guide](https://buildwithpunch.com/construction-purchasing-guide)

## See Punch work on your own workflow.

It's a working session, not a slide deck. Bring a real PO, an invoice, or a daily report. You'll use Punch on it live.

[Book a demo](https://calendly.com/taylor-punch/30min?hide_event_type_details=1&hide_gdpr_banner=1)