How McCarthy Holdings, Inc. Saved 10,450 Hours With Automated Data Collection

About McCarthy 

McCarthy Holdings, Inc. (McCarthy) serves as the holding entity for subsidiaries including McCarthy Building Companies, Inc., one of the oldest privately-held construction companies in the United States. Founded in 1864, McCarthy has grown from a small lumber business into a national construction leader specializing in complex commercial projects across healthcare, education, renewable energy, mission-critical, and infrastructure sectors.

A 100% employee-owned company, McCarthy emphasizes a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. This focus fosters a deep commitment to client satisfaction and project excellence, leading McCarthy to constantly strive to improve their performance and services.

The Challenge

In recent years, McCarthy has faced a surge in requests for sustainability data from multiple directions. Customers are requiring emissions data for their own reporting, while competitive projects increasingly seek sustainability metrics when considering bids, especially as McCarthy continues to lead in the renewables space. Pressing new local and federal climate disclosure regulations, like California’s SB 219, which would require them to report scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions to government authorities, added additional urgency. 

The scale of McCarthy's operations made traditional emissions reporting approaches particularly challenging. With hundreds of active construction projects across the country, each generating dozens of invoices monthly from utilities, fuel suppliers, and equipment rentals, the team faced a data collection avalanche with thousands of transactions to process. McCarthy needed a solution that could handle this volume while maintaining the accuracy required for regulatory compliance.

Beyond volume, McCarthy also had to contend with a complex set of data sources. Their construction sites consumed diesel, gasoline, propane, and acetylene. They purchased electricity from different utilities across different states with different rate structures. Their equipment might be owned or rented. Projects had different start and stop dates and sites could transfer ownership. They needed a solution that would make it easy to collect and parse this data without manual work.

“When you're managing 250+ active projects, the last thing you want is your project managers hunting down utility bills instead of managing builds," notes Ian Pope, Director of Sustainability at McCarthy. "The complexity isn't just in the data—it's in not disrupting the core business while capturing it.”

The Solution

With demands rising, McCarthy assessed a number of platforms to find a solution that would rigorously calculate greenhouse gas emissions to pass a regulatory standard and minimize the burden on project personnel. McCarthy's search for a partner led them to Gravity.

One of the biggest draws was Gravity’s AI-powered Bill Scan technology, which could ingest and process vast quantities of documents—utility bills, fuel invoices, waste and water bills—and automatically extract the precise information needed for emissions calculations. Using Bill Scan, Pope and the McCarthy team uploaded 39,000 pages of invoices, processing 8,594 transactions across McCarthy's entire operation. Where possible, Gravity's team also established direct integrations with utility providers, creating automated data pipelines that would update monthly without any human intervention. Once in the system, every piece of data retained full traceability to its source document, creating an audit trail that would satisfy even the most stringent compliance requirements.

"What impressed us about Gravity's approach was how it handled the complexity of our documentation," notes Pope. "Construction projects generate invoices from hundreds of different providers, each with their own format. The AI technology could accurately process all of these variations without requiring standardization."

In addition to the platform, Gravity also offered world-class support. Gravity's expert Climate Strategy team worked hand-in-hand with McCarthy, providing guidance on operational boundaries and GHG methodology in addition to system setup, training key personnel, and ensuring the platform aligned with McCarthy's operational workflows. 

"Gravity understood that we weren't just looking for software—we needed a true partner who could help us transform our approach to sustainability reporting," notes Pope.

The Result

Using Gravity, McCarthy realized massive time savings: Pope estimates that the automation saved 10,450 hours compared to manual processing. "The hours saved translates directly to our bottom line. That's equivalent to more than 500 work days our teams can dedicate to value-creating activities rather than administrative tasks,” explains Pope.

With their carbon footprint calculated and with full traceability of data to origin, McCarthy is well prepared to meet regulatory requirements, like SB 219 in California. The team has already started work on their Scope 3 footprint, which is necessary for the next round of compliance, leveraging Gravity’s platform and AI tooling to continue reducing the burden on job sites and streamlining central processes. McCarthy has also used this data to publish their own Impact Data report that serves as a comprehensive resource to demonstrate their sustainability focus in competitive bids. 

In addition to satisfying customer and regulatory compliance needs, the Gravity platform is already enabling more proactive forms of analysis, such as uncovering opportunities for cost savings and fuel efficiency improvements across regions.

"Gravity has transformed compliance from a burden into a business advantage," explains Pope. "We're meeting our regulatory obligations without disrupting our construction operations, while simultaneously gaining insights that drive efficiency improvements across our entire portfolio. It's the best of both worlds—our teams stay focused on building while we use the data to make smarter operational decisions."

As construction companies face growing pressure to report environmental data, McCarthy's experience demonstrates how technology can transform a compliance burden into a competitive advantage.

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