Bentley Systems offers ProjectWise, a construction management software for keeping construction project personnel and engineers up-to-date with most recent progress information, with daily logs and punchlists, risk item lifecycle management through identification, creation, tracking and resolution, RFI management, and document storage with automated sharing.
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Sage 100 Contractor
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Sage 100 Contractor is a construction accounting and project management software. It is intended to provide primary accounting and other management capabilities across a construction project lifecycle, including estimating, service management, and reporting.
ProjectWise is good for really large projects with many team members. I would not recommend it for small projects or those with a small team of people working on them. It is best for technical people and those who plan to use it daily. There are better FTP options out there if you just want to use them for file sharing.
Sage 100 does what it needs to do for construction project job costing, and we additionally use it to enter payroll. That process is a bit cumbersome, time consuming with the # of employees we have. If the employee timecard was a lot simpler it would speed up the weekly payroll data entry process. As far as on the financial side, no complaints. Our controller seems to be happy with the system. He originally recommended we use it to more of its capacity earlier this year
Sage integrates very well with our field time tracking software called Exaktime. We import the start/end time card data that includes job costs directly to the PR module which greatly reduces the time it takes to process payroll.
Sage 100 C payroll calculations and WC/GL overhead calculations are easy to use and understand. The WC/GL overhead calculations are posted to project costs in real-time allowing for accurate total cost reporting of the project.
Making time and material billings easier by complying with my proposal requirements.
Reducing the cost of support, since I hardly use it.
I don't like the reviews since we do a lot of small projects along with some big ones. Billings or invoices from vendors that have the same amount always trigger a question. Therefore I don't do the reviews anymore. It's so much nothing.
The cost of Sage 100 Contractor software is relatively inexpensive compared to some higher-priced options like Foundation and Microsoft Dynamics GP. But more importantly, the cost of implementing new software is costly. Implementation costs include testing and training. There are also risks involved with switching software such as missing data after conversion. Plus, there are always some unknown downsides to switching that are not apparent until the switch is made such as perceived capabilities that really don't exist. For these reasons, we will likely stay with Sage 100 Contractor for a long time. If we grow (say double) in size, we would consider other options.
If we ever have issues with Sage 100, the live chat is an awesome tool. However, most of our live chat inquiries are not because of the issues we have, but more for us to better understand how we are supposed to use the software. Sometimes we ask ourselves "what if we" and if we need guidance, the live chat will provide us with the answers or resources to figure out what we need. They always follow up to ensure the problems we encounter have been fixed. If our issue is an indicator of an upgrade that could be made, Sage 100 C offers a way to submit the idea for review and improvement of the software.
Bentley ProjectWise from a user perspective just does not stack up to even something as simple as Dropbox. ProjectWise is powerful, it is capable, it has a ton of features. The best implementation I have seen from Projectwise is where the admins unlocked everything and let the users do as they please defeating everything it stood for and using it as a big Dropbox account, though even then the user interface couldn't be improved still causing significant workflow delays. I would reluctantly leave a good company if they implement ProjectWise, I respect that it's powerful for system admins but it sucks for users. This means 2-10% of what it is used for is well designed while the other 98-90% of its functions are just bogged down by a lack of development in its user interface and I say this as someone who has periodically used it over the last 10 years and seen no effective improvement in usability. Bentley ProjectWise was one of the first I believe to do this type of system, but as is common with being the first is you don't keep up with the times and bring a lot of baggage with you.
We are currently looking at Vista as a replacement Sage 100. The estimating features appear to be exactly what our department is looking for and the accounting staff is very pleased as well. We brought in Procore about a year ago and are very happy with it. The field staff is really warming up to it and the RFI and other communication is top notch.
