ARO Group Replaces Spreadsheets, Wins More Work with Mastt

Background

ARO Group is a client-side project management consultancy led by Jamil Molinaro. The firm delivers capital projects in the agribusiness, industrial, and commercial sectors, including an industrial fertilizer processing facility in Western Australia covering both the build and the process machinery going into it.

Its clients are corporates, some of them multi-billion-dollar organizations, and they expect analytics-grade reporting. Before Mastt, that reporting ran on Excel spreadsheets, manual inputs, and layered formulas.

Challenge: Formula Risk, Zero Audit Trail

Spreadsheets could not carry the accountability these projects demanded. Once a file was emailed out, changes made to it were invisible, and one formula not dragged down meant totals silently stopped adding up. Time went into reconciling numbers and chasing versions instead of getting ahead of the project.

At the end of the day, user error occurs and sometimes things don’t add up, because you haven’t dragged down the formula. As soon as someone gets a spreadsheet, how do you trust it to keep accountability all the way through?”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}

Solution: Cost Control and Live Dashboards in One Platform

Mastt gave ARO Group a single source of truth for project cost: budgets, contracts, variations (change orders), and progress claims (payment applications) in one system, with documents linked to every entry. Mastt's cost module mirrors how a client-side PM already works, so onboarding took no formal training.

“It’s allowing us to just trust the core information. The data is there, the documents are linked to everything. That single point of truth allows us to be more proactive throughout the project.”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}

Jamil now runs steering committee meetings straight from the Mastt dashboard, using templates built for each governance level, then issues a live link and a PDF afterward. The team has also started using Mastt AI payment verification to capture data, vetting every import against the contract.

“It’s replaced the PowerPoint. No longer do I need to do that anymore.”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}

Impact: Less Admin, More Work Won

Jamil says going back to spreadsheets would cost ARO Group an extra half day of administration a week. As a transparent, fee-for-service business, ARO Group passes those efficiencies on to clients, and the visibility has lifted clients' confidence.

“We charge them less, we deliver more, which leads us to winning more work.”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}

Asked whether the firm could go back to spreadsheets, Jamil's answer is immediate.

“I couldn’t see us going backwards. Almost impossible now. This is one of those investments that has a tangible benefit.”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}

Key Insight

For a lean client-side consultancy, trusted cost data is the product. Auditable numbers, produced in a fraction of the time and presented live, have become part of how ARO Group wins work.

“Efficiency, auditability, and trust. Those are the three main words I would use to describe the platform.”
_{- Jamil Molinaro}