How F.D. Thomas Uses Clearstory to Protect Revenue and Improve GC Relationships

For decades, F.D. Thomas has built its business around complex, high-risk industrial work. As a national specialty contractor performing industrial painting, coatings, waterproofing, and concrete restoration, the company operates in environments where scope changes are frequent, documentation matters, and getting paid correctly is critical.

F.D. Thomas regularly performs work where Change Orders and T&M (time and material) work are unavoidable. As the company has grown, however, the processes used to manage that extra work have struggled to keep up with the scale and complexity of the projects themselves. “We do a lot of T&M, but at the end of the day it all rolls up into Change Orders and billing,” says Marlena Corbett, Project Controls Manager at F.D. Thomas. “If you don’t have control over that process from the beginning, you feel it later, usually when revenue is missing.”

Before Clearstory, that control was hard to maintain. Field teams relied on paper T&M tags, manual signatures, and a series of hand-offs between the jobsite and the office. By the time work was priced, packaged into a COR, and submitted for invoicing, delays were common and visibility was limited. 

“It wasn’t just one person or one step,” Corbett explains. “A tag might get filled out at the end of a shift, signed days later, emailed to the office, sit in an inbox, then get worked up at the end of the week. By the time it hit billing, you could already be behind.”

Those gaps became impossible to ignore on a large, high profile infrastructure project. When Corbett was brought in to help stabilize the job, F.D. Thomas was facing a serious problem. “By the time I got involved, we were millions of dollars through T&M tags that were lost, not found, not approved, or just not known about,” she says. “There had been a lot of turnover on both the GC and trade sides, and nobody could say for sure where everything stood.”

Recovering that revenue required months of cleanup. Paper tags had to be tracked down, logged manually, reconciled against spreadsheets, and then converted into Change Orders that could finally be invoiced. “It took four to five months of digging,” Corbett says. “We basically had to recreate a system after the fact just to understand what we had done and what we were owed.”

“The biggest change for us was visibility. With Clearstory, you can see what's been submitted, what's aging, what's waiting on approval, and what's ready to bill. Nothing is sitting in an inbox or on someone's desk anymore.”

 

Marlena Corbett

Project Controls Manager
F.D. Thomas

That experience made it clear the issue was structural. Without a shared, real-time view of T&M work, Change Orders, and COR status, the business was constantly exposed to unnecessary risk. That realization led F.D. Thomas to Clearstory.

Purpose-built to help Specialty Contractors reduce risk and get paid faster on out-of-contract work, Clearstory’s core product is a shareable, cloud-based Change Order Log that creates instant alignment between stakeholders with powerful tools like a mobile app for digital T&M Tags, built-in Change Order templates, instant pricing, and more.

“The biggest change for us was visibility,” Corbett explains. “You can see what’s been submitted, what’s aging, what’s waiting on approval, and what’s ready to bill. Nothing is sitting in a box or on someone’s desk anymore.” That visibility fundamentally changed how F.D. Thomas managed risk. Rather than discovering issues weeks later during billing or closeout, teams could address them while the work was still fresh and the project team was engaged.

“With Clearstory, I didn’t have any revenue at risk,” Corbett says. “And if something starts heading in that direction, you can catch it early and deal with it before it turns into a bigger problem.” Clearstory also eliminated a significant amount of manual effort across the organization. Before, a single T&M tag could consume hours of total handling time as it moved from the field to the office and into a COR and invoice package.

“From start to finish, you could easily spend up to nine hours across different people just handling one tag,” Corbett says. “And then you still had to scan everything, build a spreadsheet, package it into a PDF, and attach it to an invoice.” That invoice packaging alone could take thirty-five to forty minutes each week. With Clearstory, the documentation is already organized and ready when it is time to bill.

"Our crews don’t need to chase signatures or remember to follow up,” Corbett explains. “Once they submit a tag, it’s done. The office and the project managers can handle the rest.” Clearstory has also improved how F.D. Thomas works with its General Contractor partners. By sharing a live Change Order Log, both sides have access to the same information at the same time.

“They can see exactly what we’ve sent, when we sent it, and what needs action,” Corbett says. “There’s no confusion and no question about whether something was submitted.” That transparency reduces friction, speeds approvals, and helps maintain trust, especially on long-running projects with changing personnel. “It holds everyone accountable in a good way,” she adds. “And it makes the whole Change Order process feel more professional and more controlled.”

Today, Clearstory is part of how F.D. Thomas runs its projects. Instead of reacting to missing documentation months later, the team has confidence that work is being captured, aligned, and billed as it happens. “For us, it’s about control,” Corbett says. “Clearstory gives us confidence that the work we’re doing is visible, documented, and not getting lost along the way.”