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 SmartBid is also very useful for conducting sub-contracting analysis and management simulations in the didactic field. The procedures for sharing documents are helpful, but the graphic can be improved. Many forms can be pre-filled. This helps a lot in saving time and money! SmartBid is great for exporting and/or sending single or mass emails. However, as mentioned, it would be useful to simplify some pre-construction processes and improve the overall communication
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 It's very easy to set up a job and manage who receives solicitations. You can also keep detailed notes on who've you contacted and see if they're actually downloading and reviewing the documents. You can add a confidentiality agreement clause which they must accept before accessing the documents. It then stores this information if it ever needs to be accessed. This is much cleaner and easier then sending out a NDA form and having the subcontractor return it before actually sending drawings/docs. You can send Invitations to Bid and set it up to continue sending these ITB's until the subcontractor responds. However, this can also be a negative point because once you set up a delayed ITB, it doesn't update as the subcontractors view and respond to the ITB's. So if a sub is "Not Responded" and you set up a delayed ITB to fire off every day for 5 days, and the sub responds after day 2, that sub will continue to receive ITB's for all 5 days. Uploading drawings is quick and easy. It's especially convenient if you link to one of your cloud services such as Egnyte, Google Drive, etc. The search tools are quick and easy and often very accessible from any page. 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 We have seen intermittent problems with notes disappearing. Ability to have more than one project bidding open at the same time/on multiple windows. Mobile apps. 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 SmartBid has an excellent support team that is always at your service. Any problem I've had (when I've even had them) has been resolved almost immediately, along with tips on how to avoid them in the future. If you're looking for a program with excellent customer service, look no further than SmartBid.
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 SmartBid is used by more of the contractors that we happen to do lots of work with. It has basically the same features. However, SmartBid will let subcontractors view all the jobs a general contractor is bidding, even ones we were never invited to. So it has the potential to bring more opportunities.
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 It is a big time saver compared to sending out individual emails. It saves time in having multiple individual databases for company contact info. It ensures that everyone is getting the same information. Read full review ScreenShots