Several people on here use Trimble; ONE of these days I am going to make time to demo it, because we’ve been talking about switching for awhile. I have some friends that use it and swear by it.
We use Conest. It’s nice, it works, but there are some things about it that aggravate me. Making assemblies and looking up material is one of them. I’ve tried repeatedly to use the JobTrac software proficiently, and on large jobs it’s just a pain. The majority of the items in the assemblies don’t match up to the part numbers my suppliers use. The pricing is fairly accurate through Netpricer, but again, if it’s not the exact same part number, it won’t be the exact price. Creating purchase orders can be a hassle. If I only have 1000 connectors in my take-off, and I need 1001, it won’t let you go over the set amount on the purchase order. You have to manually enter a new line for the additional material. Just little things like that which bug me.
But I’m solidly entrenched in it now having spent hours upon hours building custom assemblies for my specific work. Which is why it hasn’t been such a priority to demo something else.
Another thing that bugs me; let’s say you’re bidding a large office or multi-family unit with repeated floor plans. I can’t just do a take off of a floor plan and multiply it 100 times. You have to go to Every. Single. Line. and manually do the multiples of each item. Lots of calculator work involved there.
And it doesn’t always let me breakdown my take-off’s exactly how I want to see them, which again is really a pain on large jobs with repeated floor plans. Some contractors want to know how much you’re charging for Unit Type A or Office Type A; well idk I’ve got 9000 receptacles and 2000 switches, let me get the calculator out and break all this down. I’ve just always felt that for what it costs, it ought to be able to do those calculations for me.
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