Buildertrend

The product does look good and they seem well capitalized which bodes well for their longevity. They also bought the software that we used, CoConstruct, and had said they were going to merge the two, taking the best of both software.

We moved from CoConstruct. Buildertrend has a ton of features but it is not intuitive and does not tie together well. It is a mile wide but an inch thick. It is not designed for the Custom Home Builder, it is for a production Builder software. It does not tie well to Quickbooks either.
Overall Builder Trend has lots of features, but they "live" in different silos and one function does not communicate well with the other function.
The estimate software is bad, and way too complicated. You cannot condense multiple estimate lines into love category, etc....
The specifications tab does not translate to the selections. You cannot add attachments to the specifications.
CoConstruct was a beautiful software that worked wonderfully and was design to be efficient. Builder Trend is not.

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

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.

I like that it is easy to use. I also LOVE the iPhone app. Once everything has been loaded, I can send large files, communicate effectively, and raise the efficiency of my team and sub-contractors. I also Love the ability to template a project for easy set up of a new project!

When building significant line item estimates, the browser page has to refresh each time as you switch from the budget tab to the estimate tab. Even with a fast connection, it takes a bit of time to update. Not a big complaint since you can upload a spreadsheet from excel for the initial set up.