How U.S. Shingle and Metal grew from a micro roofing business into an 85-person operation with Mercury

Two years ago, Nikki Macella joined U.S. Shingle and Metal to help scale the business, taking on the role of majority owner and de facto CFO. Previously a father-and-son roofing operation incorporated in Florida in 2019, the company was run like many small businesses are: with manual financial operations run by countless spreadsheets and records kept in Manila folders. For Macella, this presented an immediate opportunity to bring structure and modern systems to how the business managed money.

With her eye on growing and transforming the business, Macella sought to level up the financial operations, shifting away from traditional banking and toward something that better suited the company’s current and future needs. Rather than spend time on branch visits and phone calls, she wanted to be able to send wires, pull reports, and manage the accounts online.

However, in order to rebuild the company's financial operations from the ground up, Macella needed to find a bank to support her big dreams. Ultimately, she landed on Mercury to put in place automated accounting processes, new systems for tracking spend, and the financial infrastructure to support an entirely new line of business as the company brought metal manufacturing in-house.

Behind the scenes, U.S. Shingle and Metal’s Mercury setup reflects the same structured approach Macella took to rebuilding the broader business. The company runs a dedicated operating account for day-to-day expenses and a separate checking account built specifically for incoming job-site payments.

That second account solves a specific problem: getting checks from the field into the bank without giving foremen visibility into the company's money. Macella paired the account with a custom “Deposit Funds” permission, which lets foremen log in to make mobile check deposits without being able to see the operating account, send money, or move funds anywhere. “I set up a checking account for that reason,” she says. “They just have access to one account so they can make deposits.”

The same goes for Macella’s full team of more than 50 Mercury users. Only a small group of administrators can send money or move funds between accounts; everyone else operates under roles scoped to exactly what they need, without company-wide financial visibility. The result is a permission model that scales with a large, frequently changing field team without requiring Macella to loosen control over who can actually touch the company’s money.

Roofing work happens on job sites, not in an office. U.S. Shingle and Metal’s crews — the roofers and supervisors tearing off and installing shingle and metal roofs across Florida — need to be able to purchase materials, gas, and day-to-day items like food while they’re out working. To manage this, Macella issues each supervisor of the field crew an individual Mercury credit card. With its own budget attached, spend can be tracked to the person rather than lumped into one general account.

“All of our foremen who are out in the field have a credit card,” Macella says. Each cardholder uploads receipts for their team’s purchases — often in real time — which gives Macella a clean, itemized record to reconcile against each month, so she isn’t chasing down paper receipts herself or guessing what a charge was for after the fact.

With dozens of active cards spread across job sites and a large, steady volume of monthly spend running through them, cards assigned by person or by project are what make that volume manageable. Macella can see exactly who spent what, and on which job, without having to untangle it after the fact.

Before Mercury, the company had no true bookkeeping system to speak of. Today, U.S. Shingle and Metal runs its books through Mercury’s QuickBooks integration. Transactions are auto-categorized by GL code so spend flows into the right place without manual re-entry each month.

Macella has also built directly on top of Mercury’s API, using it for cash flow forecasting and to reconcile incoming deposits against the company’s CRM. “I’ve used it mostly for forecasting and showing what we’re spending,” she said. “I also use it within our CRM, to cross-reference the deposits in Mercury and make sure everything that’s logged in the CRM is actually being deposited.”

The company has also recently started using Mercury Invoicing, giving Macella one more piece of financial operations she can run from the same place as everything else. With invoicing built directly into Mercury, incoming payments are automatically matched to the right invoices, and those transactions sync to the company's accounting ledger, Quickbooks — helping to keep the books consistently up to date rather than chasing data across another disconnected tool.

Macella’s approach to the company’s financial operations was simple: automate the routine work so she could use her time growing the business, not pushing buttons. Issuing cards to a growing field crew, building an account structure with the right permissions, and syncing transactions to QuickBooks has created an automated engine that’s given Macella more bandwidth to build and less time on financial admin.

That bandwidth showed up most clearly in the company’s biggest bet yet: bringing metal manufacturing in-house, a costly and complicated expansion.

The bet paid off. Converting shingle-roof customers to metal roofs now makes up roughly 70% of U.S. Shingle and Metal's business and lifted margins by 12–15%. Alongside that expansion, the company grew from one Florida county to 19 counties. Its sales force also grew from one rep to 50 — all while financial operations kept pace without adding headcount or friction.

Since consolidating its financial operations on Mercury, U.S. Shingle and Metal has been able to:

• Cut down on untracked job-site spend by issuing individual cards with dedicated budgets to foremen across 19 counties in Florida.
• Spend less time chasing receipts by turning manual, itemized uploads into a straightforward monthly reconciliation process.
• Move money with fewer manual steps by running a purpose-built account structure that mirrors how a construction company actually manages cash.
• Offering risk-free team access to company bank accounts while keeping money movement locked to a small group of admins, and only giving field staff the access they need through necessary permissions.
• Reduce manual bookkeeping work by auto-categorizing transactions by GL code and syncing them directly to QuickBooks.
• Build custom finance workflows faster with forecasting and CRM-reconciliation tools layered on top of Mercury's API.