Simpro vs. UDA Construction Suite

Simpro is well suited for job and team management, tracking inventory and the workflow is very logical. The mobile app for our field technicians works very well to clock on and off and then being in a position to report to a customer based on factual information has made invoicing a breeze! Reporting can be a bit frustrating especially on materials used on different cost centre numbers as you can only specify a job number, but not a cost centre number.

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If you've never used software before and have low expectations, then you might be able to make it work out.

• Billing: straight from a closed, complete job. Carries overall equipment, hours, takes one click to bill.
• simPRO retains notes on all emails; notes can be entered by anyone to track communication with clients.

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• The beautiful user interface. It looks good.
• Their videos are professional.
• They have webinars.

• Ability to create leave forms for the employees (to my best knowledge, this doesn't exist).
• Ability to color code jobs, quotes by criticality.
• Assign status to equipment (e.g. "ordered"; "arrived").

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• Their spell checker creates a squiggly line to tell you that you have a misspelled word, but, doesn't allow you to correct it.
• The spell checker lets you add custom words to a dictionary, but, it can only use one dictionary at a time to check spelling. So the default dictionary gets used, and your custom words still show up as being spelled wrong!
• You can't select-copy addresses, in order to paste them somewhere else.
• Using duplexing on my printer doesn't work right. It works for every other software I own, but not in UDA.
• There is a bug in the WIP date range that doesn't pull accurate data.
• "Options" in the estimate show only cost, not margin. So if you show your customer that report, you are revealing cost info, not selling price!!
• You can't import a PDF into bid notes, even though the premise of UDA is to try to make it a single repository for all your information.
• You can't use the arrow key to browse photos in UDA. You need to close, and click into the next one. No inuitive functionality.
• The estimating module separates material and labor, in ways that create a very confusing Scope of Work. You need to select the labor item from your database, then separately select the material from your database. You end up with two line items in your Scope of Work for the same thing. Instead of writing, "Supply and Install a new window" you have "Supply a new window" and then "Install a new window." It's hard for my estimator, and confusing for my client.
• UDA will WREAK HAVOC on your contacts in Outlook.
• It does a terrible job of managing husband/wife or partner/partner situations. You can't mail merge them properly, or, you get forced into combining their contact into into a single contact-- and then how do you know whether the cell phone is his or hers???
• There is no good way to credit design fees against the construction contract, if you happen to use that paradigm for your contracts.
• There is no way to filter contracts by their date created. So, how do you find your newest contacts for entering them into something such as Constant Contact?
• If you try to use integration of QuickBooks(QB) and UDA, your ITEMS list in QB will either get expanded to hundreds or even THOUSANDS of items... or, your POs in QB will get created in a summary form such that they are virtually meaningless.
• The "lead funnel" graphic may look cool, but there is not a good way to actually report on the lead status, track the activities and calls that you make, note significant emails that you write, or keep track of when you send out thank-you cards or spiffs/gifts!
• They might tell you that these things work, but, after spending MONTHS with UDA, I found out that these problems are deal breakers.
• Within their customer service department, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. They do not use a structure such as Zendesk that so many other great companies use. Even though I was paying for priority support, there were often days going by where I could not get a call or email back to assist me with a support request or provide a tutorial on how to do something. Had I not paid extra for support, this would be acceptable. But when paying for "TotalCare" priority support, there are times when the software had me stuck, and I was stuck for a day at a time waiting for an answer. Sometimes no answer ever arrived.

As mentioned before, materials reporting could use some work as one cannot report by cost centre number, only by job number. It makes it difficult with large jobs with multiple cost centre numbers to easily extract information for reporting. Other than that the system is user friendly and easy to understand.

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It is a great option for solar project management. It needs some improvements for real-time one-page reports, inventory management, scheduling and custom views. I believe these will come because they listen to their customers. I would also like to see some better training and not be expected to pay out of pocket for it.

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monday.com was easier to set up and you can create boards with loads of subtasks which helps manage a project. Also, the ability to integrate with google was much better as we could link it to the calendar and also store documents that the engineers could see easier onsite. Overall we could make monday.com work better for our business based on how we are set up but simPRO will be great for other businesses with more specific needs.

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QuickBooks has great quality assurance and while they don't provide support, their software is nearly flawless. Co-construct provides great support and solves problems. In comparison, UDA Construction Suite is full of flaws, and their customer service department is disorganized and overworked.

• Increased team collaboration.
• Increased inventory awareness.
• Decreased down time between jobs.

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• All my money was wasted. I could not get a refund.
• All my time was wasted. I spent much time on customer support, and even more time "stuck" where customer support could not be reached.
• My staff time was wasted, because it was hard for them to implement and then we ultimately abandoned it.