Likelihood to Recommend We have recommended to at least two other colleagues. It helps to prevent dishonest time keeping. Manual timekeeping by a supervisor seems to create a lot of room for errors including forgetfulness of who showed up and when. It's nice to be able to track when each employee is working or how many people are on each worksite.
Read full review Easy to use, one-stop for all construction-related tasks. The best thing is the split-screen, during the Bill of Quantity verification users can see for what part of the design Bill of Quantity is generated. Auto-updating of Design is another good feature.
Read full review Pros Employee logs in and answers health-related questions before beginning work. They remotely provide their own timesheet information, adjustable by the administrator where needed. Location at time of login is readily available. Distance from jobsite can be determined at any login. Time for lunch is automatically deducted from work hours, logged by type of work interrupted, and easily adjustable by the employer if necessary. Reports by employees of time spent on any type of work during the work day and work week are readily available. Work by job name is also available. Read full review Allows multiple users to work on the same estimate at once. This is huge!! Not only can we team up on a project that has a quick deadline but we can also simultaneously collaborate on database updates. Performs your takeoff on CAD drawings or vector PDFs. Your typical takeoff software does takeoff on an unintelligent PDF. I say unintelligent because the process you go through is simply to trace the boundaries of your shape. This is time-consuming and can lead to mistakes. With CostX your cursor will stick to the line lines and takeoff the exact measurement. This has cut our takeoff time by 75%. The best part is that this is done in the same software as your estimating software. There are a few software's that have takeoff and estimating in one but CostX is the only one the provides CAD smart takeoff. CostX is a lot like Excel. You have the flexibility to set up your workbooks the way your project team thinks. For example, ours is set up to evaluate labor in two ways; productivity (man-hours per widget) or crew hours (3 guys for two days for a given activity). Reports are very flexible and the report writers is much easier than Crystal reports. If you subscribe to the full version of CostX this provides the most powerful feature of them all......Auto-Revisioning. This function will compare two sets of drawings, identify the changes on a color coded drawing, ask for you to approve the changes and then update your estimate and takeoff. You can even use this to produce custom print outs for RFI's show your design team what changed. Your estimating workbooks are live-linked to your takeoff. As you make adjustments to your takeoff your estimate updates accordingly. The workbook has color coded text to hep your team understand whats behind your estimate; Black = manually input, Blue = rates linked to database, and Green = quantity linked to take-off. Full integrated subcontractor comparison. We use to do this in excel to compare multiple bidders across every division. This is also color coded for a streamlined review process; green = quote, blue = estimate, purple = plug, and orange = other. Built in error checking notifies you if you forgot to normalize an item on your subcontractor comparison. In the near future the software will be available online allowing you to use remotely. Read full review Cons It would be a nice feature if employees could add photos of their progress on jobsites The GPS could be a bit more exact for tracking employees The reports page online is not the most user friendly page. It seems dated. Read full review iTwo Costx has 3D features that may require enhancement in terms of Look and feel perspective. The eye Function section view feature may require enhancement. But I am not sure how much more we can bring it to scale Not seen Cloud base service. So that easy to use from any where. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is easer to keep someing going then change things out. Our employees have taken 6 months to learn this one, I do not want to reinvent the wheel. Just this week I have seen inprovment as they now know they do not get paid if they do not clock in and back out every day.
Read full review Usability It's easy for anyone tech savvy. It is kind of impossible to make anything even more user-friendly than it already is. The app itself has zero issues for all my staff. The admin side of things takes a bit more knowing and learning.
Read full review Support Rating I have not had to use support other then as we got started and had a few hick ups but they were great. They answered all our questions even if some of them were no the program does not do that. I guess the best support is one that is not needed because the product works great and does its job right
Read full review Implementation Rating Gave a notice to all employees to come to work 15 min early on the day planned to implement the program. I had Spanish and English signs on how to down load the program and log in I showed them ALL how to log in and out and explained that they are responsible for reporting accurate time. I had them all sign a policy that lunch breaks were mandatory for all employees at least 30 min per day. This ensures safety on the roofs. We had a few people who did not have passwords to the app store and we had a few problems with android phones but most of them were on their way quickly. Most not happy about the change but I hope they see the benefit of it now.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We still use Sage, and ExakTime is compatible with it, which is why we went with ExakTime. So technically we use both at this time. ExakTime is a great pairing with Sage since Sage does not have any applications that let employees clock in and out. So we use ExakTime for that and then transfer the information to Sage for the reporting and issuing of deposits/checks, etc.
Read full review We are not aware of another software that has fully integrated take-off, subcontractor comparison, estimating and reporting besides CostX.
Read full review Return on Investment Saved at least 15 hours of time entry per week Employees clock in and out with accuracy to the minute instead of guessing how many hours they worked on each job/day Jobs/locations are listed on the app so employees can easily find the job they are working on instead of hunting through paperwork to find the location number Geofencing tracks employees clocking in outside the job location Read full review Easy to Collaborate Between the Team members. Saves a lot of work Integrate with multiple types of data drawing which saves efforts in converting the design. Bill of Quantity export can be done based on the Design section and can share with contractors for Quotes. Instead of just downloading the whole report and then editing for the required pack. Read full review ScreenShots