Buildertrend

Avantages

The best aspect of Buildertrend, would have to be the daily logs and customer ability to follow their daily project progress. Time tracking for employees, lead tracking, customer tracking, ability to sign projects electronically, receive payment online with minimal fees, and communicate with everyone involved with each project.

Inconvénients

Buildertrend is a bit convoluted and cumbersome for the small company like myself. Being out on the job physically working to make ends meet due to employee shortages, leaves me with little time for office work. When I do have time for office work, I struggle to find the time needed to enter enough information in BT, to get back what we are paying for it. The more we enter the more we benefit. BT was difficult to learn in some areas of the program, and upgrades sometimes require even more training. We struggle with scheduling, and getting project information to show up on quickbooks.

Avantages

It provides a solution for managing a construction company

Inconvénients

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' :)

Avantages

I like the sense of security it provides to our customers since they can log in and see how their job is doing.

Inconvénients

It does everything, but it doesn't do everything WELL. For instance, it does time tracking and GPS tracking.... but it only tells us where our guys are when they clock in and out. It doesn't give us a map of where they went the whole time like T-sheets did, so we have no way of knowing if someone went to the job site, clocked in and then left. It sync's to Quickbooks for payroll, but not correctly. It sends over all of the guys time as Regular time. I have to manually input their hours if I want to pay them for their overtime. It has this Buildertrend Flat Rate Code that nobody can edit or delete and it causes a lot of problems for us. The list goes on..... Whenever I ask them if they can help, I'm told, "Well it doesn't have that feature." Then I ask if they can put in a tech request, but they go on telling me how I should do it online, it will be more effective. That's not right. They should be able to put in a tech request for me and have it be just as effective as if I did it online.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I like how easy BuilderTrend is to navigate and use. The system is definitely more user friendly than any other platforms I have used in the past. I also like how visually appealing it is, rather than only focusing on functionality, creators also focused on it being nice to look at every day, which truly does make a difference when working in the same program for hours every day.

Inconvénients

The quickbooks connection to desktop is very very clunky and can can and has caused major issues for us in the past. In terms of accounting, there are somethings that could be better. I would like to be able to see what has been sent over vs. what has actually been paid out to a sub, so the builder can tell without having to ask the accounting department whether or not someone has actually been paid, a more detailed status report would be great. I would also like for it to play better with the "projects tab" in quickbooks. Quickbooks has made a great projects tab, but it is not usable without how the information is brought over. this may not be possible, but it would be nice. :)

Buildertrend is designed mostly for custom builders in the way that it is designed to connect homeowners and use allowances. I would like in the future if there were more production building type features.