Qanstruct

Carly Vanderkolk is the IT coordinator every team wishes they had: steady, systems-minded, and able to bring order to any environment where hardware is constantly moving. She supports a footprint that spans the Qanstruct head office, multiple provinces, and a constant rotation of employees cycling through remote sites. She handles everything from shipping laptops and AV equipment to job sites to reconciling inventory and maintaining clean, reliable records. 

Years ago, long before the company expanded into a more formal structure, Carly took it upon herself to find and implement Reftab. As the organization grew, the system she built quietly became the backbone of how the firm tracks, distributes, and manages equipment.

The cracks that surfaced as the company scaled

The early system was piecemealed together with spreadsheets. But as the company grew from a small to medium-sized firm, the cracks surfaced. The spreadsheets weren’t built for the volume and pace the company eventually reached. More sites. More employees. More equipment in motion. And more questions coming from leadership about what was deployed where and how old it was.

Carly says, “We had no idea where anything was.”

She was fielding constant email requests to update spreadsheets, verify asset age, and reconcile equipment that moved between sites.

She adds, “It was just inefficient and they come with so many mistakes or equipment that wasn’t tracked properly.”

As executive expectations increased, she needed faster visibility, cleaner reporting, and an IT asset management system that didn’t require digging through notes or relying on memory.

Choosing a platform that matched their workflow 

When her boss put her in charge of finding a better solution, Carly evaluated several asset management tools, including a few Australian options, but none matched what she needed for day-to-day IT work. 

Reftab immediately felt like the right fit.

“My boss put me in charge of finding an asset management system and I signed up to a few of them and gave them all a test run,”

Carly said.

“And there were also a couple of Australian based as we typically try to be local, but in the end I signed up with Reftab just because of its usability. It was fantastic. . .  “

“The team has been so responsive to things that I’ve asked for and just come straight back to me and it’s just become morphed into something that just keeps ticking the boxes for me along the way.” 

The speed, the flexibility and the responsiveness from the Reftab team made the choice easy.

Building a scalable system that lets the team move faster

Carly customized Reftab to mirror the reality of a multi-state IT operation. She created fields for equipment models, invoices, suppliers, and asset costs. She logged repair notes so the entire team could see technical history at a glance. She set up loaner tracking so equipment could move between people without getting lost in the shuffle. And she created the reporting foundation the leadership now depends on.

But, the bigger story was Reftab didn’t just improve Carly’s workflow. It democratized how their 3-person IT team operated. Instead of every request going through her inbox, all three IT team members now update the system directly in real time.

“Now it’s so much easier and more up to date that everyone are using it,” she says. 

Suddenly, no one had to chase old emails or guess where equipment was last seen. Everything lives in one clean, shared source of truth.

Using reporting to guide better asset decisions

As the company has grown, leadership began requesting deeper visibility. They needed to know how old each laptop was, what would need replacement next year, and how many machines were still viable. With Reftab, Carly could pull reports and answer instantly.

Carly adds, “I just don’t know how I would’ve coped without this software to just make a report that’s also visually fantastic for them.” 

In particular, the laptop age report became a key tool for cash-flow planning, allowing finance to forecast refresh cycles without guesswork.

The moment the team could finally work ahead

With Reftab in place, everything got lighter. Instead of reacting to issues, the IT team could finally operate proactively, including planning refresh cycles, tracking equipment aging across sites, and maintaining accurate records without friction.

Carly says,  “It’s so much more efficient and effective for my time use as well.”

This system also gave the team room to think strategically about how they support the business moving forward.

Plus, an added benefit for Carly was Reftab’s support. Anytime she raised a request or shared an idea, it actually went somewhere.

She adds, “You’ve [Reftab] been really fantastic with bringing your customers along with the software.”

As the company continues to grow, she now has a platform built to scale with it.