Levelset found the missing link between doing the work and getting paid

At CSI Electrical Contractors, a bill could go unpaid for a remarkably undramatic reason. The company had not submitted a lien waiver. The electrical work and the payment paperwork occupied different worlds, and the second world occasionally forgot to tell the first that it was finished.

That detail appears in Levelset’s account of its customer’s move to automated lien rights management. It is a useful place to begin. Construction payment problems invite grand explanations: difficult clients, tangled contracts, too many parties. Sometimes the explanation is a document that never left the office.

The invoice has travelling companions

An invoice says what someone owes. In construction, the path to payment also involves people and documents beyond that invoice. A supplier may sell to a subcontractor working for a general contractor on an owner’s property. Each participant sees a different slice of the project. Each may need paperwork from somebody else.

Levelset operates in that space. Its software helps teams send preliminary notices, manage lien-related deadlines, exchange waivers, and keep records together. Those are distinct tasks. A notice can help preserve payment rights; a waiver concerns giving up specified lien rights in connection with payment. Treating every document as another attachment misses the business reason it exists.

The company’s current product presentation serves material suppliers, equipment rental businesses, subcontractors, and general contractors. The emphasis is on credit and finance teams handling many jobs. For them, a recurring paperwork mistake is an operating problem: it multiplies as the business grows.

The filing cabinet ran out of road

CSI implemented Levelset in 2017 as its business expanded. Before that, it used a provider for preliminary notices, but the surrounding process remained manual. Files existed; certainty about what had been sent did not. Louie Trujillo, its director of project controls, wanted a more organized way to manage the work.

The replacement was specific. CSI configured a rule to create preliminary notices for jobs above a chosen dollar threshold. Waiver handling also became part of a defined billing process. The customer story attributes faster payments to getting those waivers submitted more efficiently. This is a reported customer experience, rather than a promise that every invoice will move faster.

“It’s a really simple process.”

Louie Trujillo, CSI Electrical Contractors, on the company’s waiver workflow

Notice the sequence. The team did not begin with a more forceful collections letter. It addressed the missing step before collections. That is the transferable idea: establish which event should trigger a document, who reviews it, and how the team knows it was sent. Software then has a job precise enough to perform.

Twenty hours hiding in the dates

Emser Tile offers another example. Its Levelset case study describes a distributor with 80 branches across 35 states. Before partnering with Levelset in 2015, it faced inconsistent filing prices, fragmented providers, and manual tracking that contributed to missed deadlines.

One task was particularly revealing. As products shipped or services were delivered, employees had to cross-reference information in their ERP and adjust deadlines. The company reported that this consumed 20–30 hours a month. Levelset’s project clustering matched invoices and updated deadlines using keywords, eliminating that manual task, according to the customer account.

The lesson here is less theatrical than “digital transformation.” Date maintenance was consuming staff attention. Removing it gave the credit team fewer opportunities to overlook an adjustment. Useful automation often looks exactly like this: an irritating recurring chore disappears, and the department can stop treating it as weather.

A lien company learns to look upstream

Scott Wolfe Jr., a construction lawyer in New Orleans, began the business that became zlien in 2007. Local coverage places its origin in the city’s post-Katrina construction economy, where finding work and getting paid for it could be painfully different achievements. Wolfe later made it his full-time business.

In his retrospective, Wolfe describes an early product inspired by straightforward online legal tools: help somebody who had gone unpaid make a claim. Investigating why customers needed that claim pushed the company into notices, waivers, pay applications, and education. The product moved closer to the events that preceded the dispute.

That broader ambition eventually needed a broader name. zlien became Levelset in March 2019. The change makes sense as positioning: a business built around getting people paid has more room to grow than a name announcing a single legal mechanism. The analysis is ours; the rebrand is part of the public record.

There was also a geographic character to the operation. Levelset’s careers material describes offices in New Orleans, Austin, and Cairo. Its historical culture writing emphasizes purpose, service, learning, and relationships between coworkers. Today that careers page points into Procore. A startup’s remembered atmosphere and its parent company’s current employment experience should not be mistaken for the same snapshot.

The researcher behind the automation

A document can be beautifully generated and still contain the wrong project information. Levelset’s answer includes Scout Research: a team that verifies job details and fills gaps in customer records. The human work is part of the proposition. Automation needs to know which people and property it is talking about.

Waiver management supplies another piece: templates, a centralized inbox, signature routing, and a portal for retrieving or requesting documents. In its automation demonstration, Levelset shows configurable rules for customers or job segments, timing, and review queues. Teams can retain an approval step instead of assuming every generated form should immediately leave the building.

Job Radar adds monitoring for payment actions and financial issues on followed jobs. Job Tree helps identify other parties in the payment chain. Together, these features aim to make the project less opaque to a credit team that knows its customer but may not know everyone above or below that customer.

Why Procore wanted the documents

Levelset announced a $30 million Series C in December 2019, led by Horizons Ventures. Contemporary reporting put its total outside investment at about $47 million. Then, in November 2021, Procore completed the acquisition for an announced price of approximately $500 million, split between roughly $425 million in cash and $75 million in stock.

Procore’s stated rationale combined lien management with the opportunity to use complementary data. Its September announcement reported more than 250,000 Levelset users and 6.5 million construction projects. Those are dated acquisition-era figures. They help explain the appeal of a business that knew about payment relationships as well as paperwork.

The integration remains visible in Procore Pay. July 2026 support notes describe expanded mapping of commitment and invoice fields directly into Levelset waiver templates. The larger platform places those document workflows alongside payment requirements and invoice payments. It is a logical home for a product concerned with the dependencies surrounding an invoice.

Buy the process, price the whole job

Levelset earns money through business software subscriptions and related implementation and document services. Its public pricing page invites a consultation. Published merchant-offer terms distinguish subscription fees from postage, filing, processing, professional services, overages, and taxes. The practical purchasing question is therefore the total cost of a representative month, including actual document volume.

Competition is real. Handle also offers construction lien and notice management, waivers, and credit workflows. Siteline puts lien rights within subcontractor billing and collections. Levelset’s case rests on its combination of research, document automation, risk visibility, and Procore connections. The fit depends on where a buyer’s work gets stuck.

There are limits. Accurate inputs, maintained rules, and someone responsible for exceptions remain necessary. A payment dispute may need professional judgment; an insolvent customer does not become solvent because its waiver inbox is orderly. Procore also ceased new originations under the materials-financing program inherited with Levelset in October 2023. That discontinued lending activity should be kept separate from the ongoing software offering.

A reader can copy the useful habit without copying the company: trace an unpaid invoice backward. Find the missing document, the uncertain date, or the ownerless task. Give that step a trigger and a person. CSI’s experience suggests that sometimes the quickest route to getting paid begins with checking what never got sent.