Keith Castro knows what it takes to keep a commercial fire sprinkler contractor running at full speed. As Senior Project Manager and Estimator at Eco Fire Sprinklers, Castro carries responsibility for estimating new work, coordinating field operations, and managing Change Order and T&M workflows across an active portfolio of commercial projects. Tools that make all of that run faster and cleaner are ones he takes seriously.

Before Clearstory, Change Orders at Eco Fire lived in a Google Drive spreadsheet. Castro would collect information from the field, manually enter it into the spreadsheet, convert it to a PDF, and email it to the GC for approval. Once it left his outbox, there was no shared system of record, no visibility into where things stood, and no reliable way to keep Change Orders moving through the approval process.

Without real-time alignment, costs could quietly accumulate across a project with no clear picture of what was pending, what had been approved, and what still needed attention on either side. By the time a job reached closeout, that lack of visibility had a way of creating difficult conversations that a cleaner workflow would have prevented entirely.

"When you're emailing PDFs back and forth with no real tracking, things get buried on both sides and you don't find out until the end of the job when the money's already tight and you’re negotiating on change orders," Keith says. "That's where we could lose out on revenue. IT could be a real challenge for us."

All of that changed when Eco Fire Sprinklers brought Clearstory onto their projects.

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 change in how Keith aligns with GC customers has been the most significant shift of all. With Clearstory in place, he can see when a GC has opened and reviewed a submission, what has been approved, and what still needs attention, giving both sides a shared, transparent picture of where every change order stands at any given moment.

Transparency & Visibility Keep COR Approvals Moving Forward

"The transparency with the client has been a huge part of it," Keith says. "Having that visibility on both sides just makes it a lot easier to get change orders processed, closed out, and paid.”

Change notifications from GCs, including plan revisions, pricing requests, and cost impact deadlines, are tracked in the same live view, giving Keith a real-time picture of everything that needs attention across all active projects.

"Having all of that in one place means I can see exactly what needs to be priced, what's due, and what's waiting on us," says Keith. "On a busy project portfolio, that kind of visibility keeps everything moving” Keith has become such a vocal advocate for what Clearstory has done for his change order process that he now recommends it proactively to GC customers on jobs where they have not yet encountered it. 



"I'll be sending you all of my change orders through Clearstory, just so you know," he tells them. "Other people in your company are using it. It makes the change order process so much easier." 



That advocacy extends beyond his own projects. Keith regularly recommends Clearstory to peers across the construction industry at trade events and industry gatherings. 



"I show them the app and I show them how easy it is to use," he says. "I've recommended it to friends of mine not just in the sprinkler industry but in construction in general. Anyone who's still doing it the old school way, I tell them to check into Clearstory."

Clearstory has also transformed how Eco Fire captures and processes T&M work in the field. Tags are created and signed electronically at the point of capture, with photos attached, and Keith can price a full series of them into a submission-ready change order in seconds with two clicks. A process that used to demand ten to fifteen minutes of manual data entry per ticket before packaging and pricing could even begin is now essentially instant.

Keith estimates that tightening up that workflow protects up to $15,000 per project in T&M revenue that previously never made it through to submission. 

"It has streamlined the process tremendously," he says. "We've eliminated a ton of steps and we're getting paid for work that could have slipped through the cracks with paper tickets and manual workflows.”




Complementing Procore, Streamlining Workflows

Looking ahead, Eco Fire is preparing to connect Clearstory with Procore, creating an uninterrupted pipeline where change order data flows from the field all the way through to the company's accounting software. 

"We had a meeting with Procore this morning looking at the integration," says Keith. "Everything communicating from Clearstory in the field all the way to our accounting software, that's where this is going. It's amazing."

For a project manager carrying the weight of estimating, field coordination, and change order management simultaneously, the bottom line is straightforward.

"It has streamlined the process tremendously," says Keith. "From a project manager standpoint who has 50 other things to take care of before the end of the day, this just eliminates all of those Change Order and T&M headaches pretty efficiently. Anybody who's interested in transforming how they deal with change orders, I recommend Clearstory to them."