From a closed gym equipment company to seven figures in 16 months

Before Affiniti

After the gym equipment company closed

Nate Saxton’s first company sold gym equipment. When it shut down, he started over in roofing, and Nuvant went from a standing start to a seven-figure business in 16 months, with 15 to 20 employees in house and around 30 subcontractors on the roofs. Growing that fast taught him where a contractor bleeds. “Pay as much attention to the money going out as the money coming in,” he says. “Watch your waste.”

Watching it was the problem. “The hardest part about growing for me is the financial aspect. Me as an owner, I’m sitting there like, oh, how much extra did we spend on this drill? How low did our margin go because of the additional materials?”

Roofing margins live in the gap between the estimate and the job. “We estimate jobs and build takeoffs based off of satellite measurements,” Nate says, and the measurements are never perfect. “There’s a lot of additional materials that are needed from that as well. And that’s where all the money is.” Every extra run to the supply house was a cost nobody was capturing against the job it belonged to.

“I think even worse than time is the stress. I would have numbers just running in the back of my head trying to figure out where everything was, 24/7.”

Before Affiniti

The Ramp account Nate shut down

Nuvant had tried to fix this once. “We had a controller that then put us on to Ramp,” Nate says. “I shut it down because there was no value in it and I couldn’t understand how to operate the system.” The problem wasn’t the software so much as what came with it, which was nothing. “There was no onboarding process where someone comes and sits down with me and shows me how to use the service. They just say, hey, this amount per month and this is what it is.”

Ramp was also only ever going to be a card. Nate’s three biggest expenses, subcontractors, materials, and sales reps, each lived on a different rail, and a spend card touched one of them. After Ramp, the back office was still spreadsheets, a credit card on file at the supply house, and a bank that had nothing to say about any of it.

The turning point

“It sounds too good to be real. And then it was real.”

The line that got Nate’s attention was about how suppliers get paid. “Before, I was paying my suppliers with a credit card that I would put on file with the supplier, but then I would get charged a credit card fee,” he says. With Affiniti’s AP Card, Nuvant funds a card from its checking account and pays the supplier from it, with no card fee from the supplier and every payment coded to the job. “When I first heard about the AP Card, I’m like, this sounds too good to be true.”

Nuvant opened its Affiniti checking account in late June 2026 and started paying suppliers on AP Card in August. The product won Nate over. The people are what made him commit, and then turned him into the kind of customer who puts other roofers on the platform. “With Affiniti, I have somebody that I can text and call if I have questions at any time of the day, even on the weekends, and they’re responding, and not only responding, but they will jump on a call with me to figure it out,” he says. “You have your own implementation specialist who will roll up their sleeves and say, hey, let’s jump on a call and let’s get this fixed for you.”

AP Card

Paying the supply house without the card fee

Since August, Nuvant has paid $233,000 in supplier invoices across 199 AP Card payments, and about 80% of it went to its two roofing supply houses. Monthly volume has climbed from $75,000 in August to $88,000 in the first three weeks of October as more of the materials bill moves onto the card.

The mechanics are simple from Nate’s side. Money moves from checking onto the AP Card, the supplier is paid from the card, and the charge lands in Affiniti already coded to the vendor and synced to QuickBooks Online, with no one keying it in. The question of how much extra went into a job has an answer before the invoice is filed.

Bill pay

Subcontractors, materials, sales reps: all paid from one place

“Our business being our size, there’s so many invoices because of subcontractors, the materials, and then the sales reps,” Nate says. “So those are three main expenses. And now I can pay all of those through Affiniti and keep all my payments, all my invoicing, everything through Affiniti, which is great for me because now I don’t have to look at the QuickBooks. I can leave that to the people who run the QuickBooks.”

Subcontractor and crew invoices come into Affiniti as uploads. Affiniti’s AI reads each one, pulls out the payee and the amount, and queues it for approval; Nate approves, and the payment goes out by free same-day ACH from the operating account. That is 29 payments and $89,000 since August, including one mid-October payday when about 20 subcontractor and crew payments went out in a single day, each one landing in QuickBooks Online without anyone retyping it.

Cards and receipt capture

A card for the production manager, and a receipt for every extra run

The extra materials that used to disappear into the margin now have a card and a process. “Being able to give my production manager a card, and then when she makes an additional purchase, all she has to do is upload that receipt, and then we know where it’s going, to the right spot,” Nate says. “That way it’s trackable.” Every time a Nuvant project manager swipes an Affiniti card, they get an automatic text asking for the receipt. They snap a photo and send it back; Affiniti’s AI reads the receipt, matches it to the transaction, and syncs it to Nuvant’s QuickBooks, so “the right spot” is where it lands without anyone in the office touching it.

The same login holds the rest of his portfolio. “I have three businesses on Affiniti right now, and to have it all in one platform where I can just click on whichever one I want to view, it’s been a blessing, so that I don’t have to chase down or have multiple different logins.”

Outcomes

“40 hours back in my life”

“We use Affiniti for everything: bank accounts, AP, bill pay, credit cards,” Nate says. “Everything that’s in the platform keeps all of my financials in one spot.” Four months in:

• Supplier invoices paid on AP Card with no card fee: $233,000 across 199 payments since August, growing every month.
• Subcontractors, crew, and vendors paid by same-day ACH through bill pay: $89,000 across 29 payments since August.
• $464,000 deposited into Affiniti checking since June to fund both.
• Three businesses managed from one login, with employee cards and receipt capture live at the roofing company.
• QuickBooks Online synced, so Nate no longer opens it himself.

“I would say I have 40 hours back in my life because I’m not looking at spreadsheets and trying to figure out where this is going, where it’s coming,” he says. “It’s not running in the back of my head 24/7.” The reason is structural: Affiniti is now where Nuvant’s money comes in, where its three biggest expenses go out, and where the record of both is written, so the number Nate used to carry in his head is already in the ledger. He has since put other roofers he mentors on the same setup. “Same systems and processes, and that’s helped them tremendously, just like it’s helped us.”

Advice

Nate’s advice to other roofers: watch your waste, and find your who

Nate’s advice comes in two parts. The first is discipline: pay as much attention to the money going out as the money coming in, and watch your waste, because on a roofing job the waste is in the extra runs to the supply house that nobody wrote down. The second is about not doing it yourself. “Find your who, not your how,” he says. “You shouldn’t be focused on it. But there’s people that specialize in the thing you need, like Affiniti, who’s then going to solve that problem for you. So find the who, not the how.”

His measure of whether it worked is what it would cost to lose. “If Affiniti died tomorrow, I would be trying to figure some stuff out really quickly, because it would hurt the business.”