Construction Software Buyer's Guide

Understanding the basics

Construction software packages span almost the entire breadth of your business. They can address accounting, job costing, estimating, project management, human resources, service scheduling, document imaging, fleet management, and more – so much that it can be hard to tell where to start.

Because of this, selecting exactly which problems you want to solve and improvements you want to make are important first steps in making a purchasing decision. Some common areas to address include:

• Improving your bidding process
• Catching cost overruns more quickly
• Reducing back office paperwork and processing
• Enhancing communication with clients, contractors, and vendors
• Finding opportunities for reducing costs
• Better scheduling of employees, contractors, and equipment
• Organizing permits, plans, and other documentation
• More thorough tracking of requests for information (RFIs) and change orders

Knowing which areas are the most important to you can help you find the right type of software. Vendors typically provide systems that address several of these areas, but most often they specialize in one or two. A company that focuses on job costing may not offer full-featured back-office accounting, and one that adequately handles accounting may not offer estimating at all.

The challenge, then, is to consider how to get all the pieces you need. Choosing a soup-to-nuts system from a single vendor reduces the integration challenges you might face if you used multiple applications from different vendors. However, the functionality or usability of each individual module in any one package may not offer everything you need.

Ultimately, the best management system for your construction firm may consist of multiple software packages. If your emphasis is on job costing and estimating, you may be better off choosing a job costing system that works with a general accounting package, along with a stand-alone estimating package. Be prepared to consider multiple approaches as a way to reduce your total costs.

Additional questions to consider
The functional decisions – what you need the software to do – are important, but you also need to consider several questions about your business and environment.

• Is your focus residential or commercial? Most construction software will handle both, but look for a software package that focuses on the same type of construction you do.
• What's your specialty? Just as each type of contractor faces different challenges on the job site, they also have different needs from their software. Highway construction firms, plumbers, electrical contractors, general contractors, and every other specialty have their own terms, parts, common projects, and more.
• What is your existing hardware and software environment? Basic considerations like your computer operating systems and network will impact your purchase. Be sure to gather all the relevant technical details before talking to vendors. That way, you can understand whether it's possible to integrate a particular system with existing systems, such as payroll, project management, reporting, or enterprise management software. Or, if the new system will replace your current one, you can start planning for how you'll transfer data between systems.

One highly recommended approach to buying construction software is to make sure you gather input from people in all parts of your business. In particular, involve the site managers or superintendents who will use the system in the field: their concerns might be quite different than yours. By providing a solution that helps everyone who uses the software, you can get the most out of your investment.