The best invention after the screw gun

Before Affiniti

One man in a van, 2006

Tom started Empire State Plumbing alone in a van and stayed that way for a few years before the first hires. “I gradually just started getting bigger and bigger and started taking on some employees,” he says. “And we’re just growing as fast as we can now.” The team now runs service calls across Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Saratoga Springs, and more than 160 ZIP codes in the Capital Region.

“Starting out the business, the most difficult part is finance, right? You need money to start and you need money for materials.” For years that meant a general-purpose credit card, a separate fuel card, a store card for the home center, and a bank account paying half a percent on the balance.

Before Affiniti

Back and forth between the card statement and QuickBooks

Michele Darling runs the books. “She pretty much uses the platform every single day,” Tom says, “and she’s telling me how much time it saves her.” Before Affiniti, month-end was hers alone, and by hand. “I was manually entering everything into QuickBooks,” she says. “It was a lot of paperwork. Saving it. Keeping it around.” Every expense meant a trip between the card statement and QuickBooks “to figure out what receipt goes with what expense.”

“Now that we switched over to Affiniti, the receipts are automatically downloaded. I can categorize and know who spent what, when, and where. It gives me a lot more time to do other things.”

The habit took immediately. Empire State filed its first receipt on December 24, two days before its first card purchase, and has filed 743 since, 90% of them by text, with 99% matched to the right transaction automatically. Two of every three card purchases now carry a receipt, most of them with a memo, and the whole ledger syncs to QuickBooks Online.

The turning point

“I had no idea the great platform that came with it”

Tom admits he didn’t sign up for a platform. “When we got the Affiniti credit card, I really thought that was just another card with better benefits, and I had no idea the great platform that came with it,” he says. “We just started using a little more and a little more at a time. And it just evolved into this bigger, easier program for us to use.”

The card was approved in December 2025 with a $30,000 limit. Receipt capture went live before the first swipe. Checking and bill pay were opened in February, payroll moved over in March, and the limit was raised to $50,000 in April. The product that moved the bank relationship was the one Tom hadn’t been looking for.

“The light bulb moment for me was, I just thought it was a credit card, to be honest with you. And once I realized that they had the high interest checking accounts and my bank was paying 0.5% interest on my money, that was enough right there for me to switch.”

Employee cards

Fuel cards and a Home Depot card, down to one

Chuck Lobosco, Empire State’s service manager, saw the change from the truck side. “One of the nice things was we were able to consolidate two cards down to one. Previously we had fuel cards and then a Home Depot card. Now it’s easy. They’ve got one card. They swipe it, get a text message saying, hey, this charge came through on your card. And snap a photo of it. It uploads it, and then that receipt gets assigned to the correct expense.”

Ten of the 16 cards are physical and six are virtual, and the virtual ones changed how Chuck handles a new hire or a lost card. “If I hire someone new, or need to issue a card because one got lost, I can immediately issue a virtual card, and it’ll sit on their phone in either Apple Pay or Google Pay.” Some are locked to a single supplier: “We can assign those cards to one specific vendor, so we can really zero in on what our spend is with that particular vendor.”

In ten months Empire State has put $533,000 through the card, mostly at its plumbing supply house, on radio advertising, and on truck fuel, and has paid the balance in full by weekly autopay every week since the first statement.

Checking and bill pay

Payroll comes out of Affiniti now

“We started out with just a credit card with Affiniti, and now it’s pretty much everything,” Tom says. “We’ve got the checking account… We’ve got the payroll checking account. So we keep everything separate.”

Since March, every payroll run has been pulled from the Affiniti payroll account by the company’s payroll provider: about $590,000 in wages and payroll taxes to date, with 401(k) contributions added in October. The operating account pays vendors by free same-day ACH, about one bill a week since June, and both balances earn interest while they sit.

Tom’s take on the automation behind it: “I’m starting to get used to the AI thing here. I used to be afraid of it, but I gotta tell you, this platform utilizes AI to expertly categorize all of our receipts. It talks to our QuickBooks. It gets everything synced between the Affiniti platform and the QuickBooks. It’s just incredible.”

Outcomes

“If Affiniti went away tomorrow”

“I always joke around about the screw gun being the best invention ever,” Tom says. “But I got to tell you, this Affiniti platform is. It’s just incredible. It’s almost like they can read your mind on what you need every day to run the business.”

Chuck’s measure of what changed is what would happen without it. “If Affiniti went away tomorrow, I feel like we’d step back ten years in the kind of way we’ve been conducting our expenses. And it would slow us up. There’s no doubt. It would slow us up, and we’d have less productive time out there.”

Ten months in:

• Four core products in use: employee cards, receipt capture, business checking, and bill pay.
• 16 employee cards, 10 physical and 6 virtual, replacing a general-purpose card, fuel cards, and a store card.
• $533,000 purchased on the card to date, paid in full by weekly autopay.
• About $590,000 in payroll run through Affiniti checking since March.
• 743 receipts matched automatically, covering two of every three card purchases, synced to QuickBooks Online.

Getting there took less than Tom expected. “The onboarding with Affiniti is a piece of cake. They’re like your best friend on the phone. They’ll do a Zoom call with you. It seems like they just want to help you.”

Advice

Tom’s advice to other contractors

Tom’s pitch to other owners is about responsibility, not features. “You’re a business owner and you’re responsible for the business and what happens to it. You’re responsible for all of your employees,” he says. “And if this one little tool can help you a tiny bit, it’s just such a great platform. I just would recommend that for everybody.”

Michele’s version is shorter, and it is the one the office runs on: “It gives me a lot more time to do other things.”