PlanSwift, by ConstructConnect vs. Sage 100 vs. Viewpoint ProContractor

I use PlanSwift for all my projects - it has just cut my time by a major percentage when it comes to quantifying a blueprint. At times there are funky areas, which are just hard to calculate on paper. It also has a great tool for scaling according to the dimensions, so if a drawing is missing a scale, you can always allot a scale by giving directions and then marking the points. I use this tool to check the scale as well - sometimes the drawings say something but the scale if off and you are left with an incorrect take-off. The dimension tool is a good way to check that. We don't use it much for pricing purposes though, we have found other software which are more robust when it comes to estimation, but we can see using PlanSwift for pricing sometime in the future.

Incentivized

For small and medium business in the distribution and light manufacturing space, Sage 100 is probably the best bang for your buck. As a very scaleable system, you can modify the system to meet the needs of a growing business without making gross changes to the core of the system

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ProContractor is a great fit if you are looking to make the jump to an ERP (accounting) system that offers a higher level of complexity and controls than what QuickBooks or Xero have to offer. However, some of those increased features of accounting controls, vendor compliance management, project contracting and documentation, come at the cost of lost integrations. ProContractor is completely siloed and does not openly communicate with other platforms (project management, bank accounts, etc).

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• PlanSwift can be used in basic functions (LF & SF takeoffs) very easily.
• Has a quick interface for browsing and viewing.
• Provides easy export to excel functions.

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• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

Incentivized

• They help keep me organized to see what job are coming up as well as ones in progress.
• They help me see my bills that need to be paid to vendors.
• They help me find invoices from us that still need to be paid.

• I occasionally have to load drawings at a very low DPI or I get error messages. The resulting poor resolution makes the drawing difficult to read.

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• Database backend, Sage 100 relies on the ProvideX database, which has limited ODBC functionality
• Document management. Paperless Office is not a robust solution for Sage 100 and feels like an add-on.
• Support. Getting support is tricky, and you will usually have to work with your reseller/support partner.

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• We just changed over to the cloud based system. In my opinion, it a disaster- It does not work
• Program is not responding- complete company shutdown
• Tech support is not responding

Price and not wanting to learn another software

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I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

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Plan Swift is a user friendly program that makes takeoffs easy to perform. Not a whole lot of knowledge or skill is required.

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Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.

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I give Viewpoint ProContractor a 10 out of 10. This system is user friendly to help keep me organized on a daily basis. I can find everything I need daily with this system. I am able to look up our subcontactors, vendors and clients I need to find quickly. I am able to see bills that I need to pay as well as invoices that I need to send out.

Never had an issue

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Plan Swift is only as fast as your computer system and internet

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I have called once needing support. I was asking about the "compare" tool to compare different versions. They told be about their desktop app and I downloaded. They answered quickly, you could understand them, and they took care of my question

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We use a local software technology partner to help support our Sage100 needs. We do not need much assistance with Sage100. There are very few issues or questions.

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When something isn't working, you can contact support who will gladly remote into your system and try and work out a solution. Though several of the issues we encountered, they were not able to fix and had to submit for further review. While some were eventually rectified in updates, it takes time for these to be addressed and implemented.

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just know what use you want to get out of it. In our case it was just to do area take offs.

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We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

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PlanSwift by far is the superior product. Procore is used more universally in our area, but the drawings features by far surpass Procore. We work offline usually with our tablets. This would be the only way to go when working offline. The submittal process in Procore is much better, but that would be the only thing we can see

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We have used Foundation and it did not work out well, so we selected Sage 100 because the implementation and functionality was much better. We didn't have to keep coming up with workarounds or complications on Sage 100. Also the data security is better.

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Previously our company used QuickBooks. We loved the ease of use, however we needed something with a certified payroll module. We have looked at migrating to Vista however the expense is quite large and the support we may or may not receive from Viewpoint is questionable. I say that becuase when Viewpoint stop servicing Viewpoint for Projects it was a very difficult time to even receive a hard drive with all of our documents that were stored within the service

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Several of our departments can use the take off feature to assist them in their job responsibilities.

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• Huge return on investment with time savings compared to manual / hand take off.
• Accurate and reliable numbers to use for your team.
• Creating a single take off for all parties to use, in a single location, removing all guess work or confusion.
• Inspires collaboration by having multiple people work within the same project within the software.

Incentivized

• Sage 100 has allowed us to better serve & manage our customers since we integrated it into our system in 1996. Since then, we have seen a lot of changes but, the consistent, simple layout has kept us re-newing our contract year after year.
• Ordering inventory has been easier than ever since we integrated inventory tracking. No more ordering too much or too little.

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• Procontractor allows our company to visualize the site and figure out the problematic areas that can't be seen just from plans.

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