Premier Construction Software vs. Viewpoint Spectrum

Jonas is well suited for the construction industry and for trades that work in construction. The functionality and features are set up to streamline the processes that take place daily, weekly, and monthly. You are also able to manage the big picture and track your company's information for multiple years, making it a scalable software. Our administration and project managers can streamline work from the field to the office through Jonas and we feel that is one of the biggest benefits to Jonas

Incentivized

The Installation team is amazing. They provide clear guidance at the beginning of the process regarding what is expected and what needs to be done. The implementation manager follows up monthly with you to make sure you are on track and if you need additional help. They are very helpful and responsive in resolving issues.

Incentivized

• Job Dashboard gives you a great summary of that job at a glance. I can even pull direct reports based on the fact that there are drill-downs.
• I can go right to the receipt with the GL report drill-down capabilities.
• Workflows make the product accessible from anywhere for approval when I have people on the road.
• Dragging and dropping reports to in AP will then go to documents under the job it is attached to.

Incentivized

• Job Costing - Viewpoint Spectrum handles job costing per project, per work order, per site, and gives us an up to date analysis of the project.
• HR - helps to keep all of the training certifications and HR incidents in a consistent and manageable order for all Managers to use.

Incentivized

• Workflows could be more customized
• Invoice and Subcontractor portals could be easier to use
• Blanket changes across jobs when a policy/template is changed

Incentivized

• Support isn't readily available. You can submit a ticket and wait days before it's picked up. Even critical issues (system outages) can wait an hour or two before someone responds.
• Large companies will feel limited. This product wasn't designed to handle large amounts of data, and performance seems to slow when there are more than 80 concurrent users.
• The new developments are limited. HR Management is less robust than a third-party product specializing in HR Management. Viewpoint Analytics is nowhere near as robust as Power BI or Tableau.

Incentivized

The product is working for us and the cost to implement a new system does not warrant the expense.

Incentivized

Using Premier Construction Software is intuitive. Most of the modules work the same way, so once you learn to use one, the others come easily.

Incentivized

There's a little bit of a learning curve, but once you've been working in the system for a while, it becomes second nature. I would say that out of all of the other software that I've personally used, Spectrum has been the easiest one to pick up and learn quickly

Incentivized

I've never seen Spectrum down

For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.

Incentivized

Jonas Premier has some of the best support we've received in this business. Whenever there is an issue or question, we receive a response in a timely manner and get follow up as well. We have never had an issue getting something resolved and our feedback is always taken into account

Incentivized

The support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth

Incentivized

Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.

Incentivized

My only insight would be to take time in your implementation and training process; ours was six weeks from start to finish.

Incentivized

We came away from Sage 100. We looked at Computerease and Foundation among a few others. These two were looked at most seriously.

Incentivized

I have previously used Sage Masterbuilder, another construction industry software. This has been a number of years ago. The company I am working for already had Spectrum and have been using it for as long as it has been around when it was known as Forefront. Based on conversations I've had with the personnel that were here at the time of purchase, Spectrum clicked off all the boxes they were looking for.

Incentivized

You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well

• Jonas has positively impacted our Accounts Payable and Receivable department by making tracking and processing organized and streamlined. Previously we were having to track invoices and payments through emails and various formats. We are now able to connect each AP or AR invoice to the job and subcontractor, keep track of the billing due dates, and have all the paperwork generated from Jonas.

Incentivized

• [In my opinion,] it takes at LEAST twice as long to do our jobs now.
• [I feel like] we are paranoid about something not being printed correctly because of [what I believe are] buggy text fields.
• [In my experience,] we still have to refer to a physical file cabinet with paper, even though a main point of switching was to go paperless.
• [In our experience,] screens can now be "locked", so we can't see something if our coworker is also looking at it.
• [I believe that] the financial hit our company took from this switch was astronomical. [In my opinion:] Beware!