porkchop
Well-Known Member
I need some help from those out there running a scene shop or another type of business where you're bidding on and building large elements for external customers. We've been running for years using a variety of Excel spreadsheets and it's become obvious that these are a little too easy to modify and too spread out. Also the fact that they are completely disconnected means that there is a lot of double work being done to reconcile the accounts afterwards. I'm finding a huge variety of construction estimating software out there and each has bits and pieces that I like, but nothing seems to be easily adaptable to what we do. So the question is who's using bid and estimate software that they like?
What I'm looking for:
There is some budget for the right software, but thousands per year per seat or a contract with multi-year commitment probably wouldn't work for us. Anyone have any suggestions?
What I'm looking for:
- Itemized bids referencing stored material prices for basic stuff like 3/4" ply.
- The ability to create custom line items easily.
- Some logical way to separate labor hours (eg. welding time vs carpentry time for a riser with metal framing).
- The ability to choose what of those itemized elements are shown to the customer when I send them the bid.
- The ability to charge time and materials back to that job as the work is being completed.
- A reasonable ability to reconcile estimated and actual costs so I can handle overruns as easily as possible.
- The ability to manually enter in labor hours.
- Bonus points for Quickbooks integration.
There is some budget for the right software, but thousands per year per seat or a contract with multi-year commitment probably wouldn't work for us. Anyone have any suggestions?