Buildertrend

Comentarios: The schedule keeps jobs on track. The PO process keeps costs in check. The time card keeps man hours job costed.

Puntos a favor: It provides a solution for managing a construction company

Contras: although the program performs many tasks, and even more than we need, it is glitchy and does not provide a smooth experience. When we click on windows to update budgets for instance, the windows flash and reload and resize multiple times. I have tried different browsers and different devices. This is not a user problem, but a problem with the way the data is served up. To perform some routine tasks, there is too many clicks required to get where you need to go. Too many windows and drilling down to get a number changed etc.
Too many places for messages to be hiding. Customers send a message and think we have it, but we have at least three places to check to find the message. Sometimes, messages that come to email cannot be replied to. Very frustrating.
BTW: We used Co construct for a while and liked the flow of the program much better. It ran smoother and was much quicker to get what we needed. It kept the spec sheet in front of the customer and kept good organization of communication. We switched to BT because of job costing and the time card feature, which we now understand are available with CC.
Another huge grind, the budget sheet does not do a good job of showing the running cost on the job and whether we are over or under our budget (variance). Several reports can be created, but none of them do that. We have to export to excel and manipulate it ourselves. Seems like this should be a basic function. CC does this well also. Just sayin' :)

Comentarios: With BuilderTrend, we've eliminated the need to have the classic "job binders" for our projects. Through the mobile app, we've enable our field carpenters and project managers to have all the accurate and current project information they need available on their tablets or phones. We've also enhanced communication with our client homeowners by enabling them to have on-line access to key information on-demand.

Puntos a favor: BuilderTrend has been a good solution for us to enhance our project management capability and ultimate become our CRM as we've migrated from an older CRM system. The subcontractor management and bidding, client selections, project management and scheduling, and client invoicing have all worked well for us, especially with the links to QuickBooks. We've recent adding timekeeping for our field personnel which also has simplified that aspect of our process. We also have enabled the client portal to allow our homeowners to see their selections, contracts, change orders, drawings, and payment schedules. In the 5 years we've have been using BuilderTrend, we have been impressed with the enhancements that have enable us to consolidate more of our software to BuilderTrend.

Contras: Migrating old client data did not work well and we were not provided great support with this task. The front line support people were not up to the task and continually blocked us from dealing directly with their development people to come up with creative solutions to this problem. As a result, our old client information does not have accurate date records from when they became clients. Also, as new capabilities and features are added, the custom fields that we created are no longer needed but are difficult to remove as the past information is dependent on these now redundant data elements.