PASKR

I had never heard of Paskr (P for short) until I started at a new company. I use P for Project Management and some estimating/bidding tasks. There are a couple of things that P does well but many things it does bad or isn't user friendly AT ALL. For example:

1. The menus are all slightly different and organized different. In one menu "pay applications" are called " billing". And "meeting minutes" are called "project minutes". Who calls them that?
2. The menus are all very sensitive to rolling your mouse over/down them. I am forced to go very slowly to navigate where I want to.
3. When building an estimate I cannot arbitrarily rename a cost code if the description isn't really accurate. I also cannot use the same cost code multiple times. I might want to do that if I am breaking an estimate down into multiple phases or areas.
4. Estimating is very rigid and not user friendly for reporting how estimates evolve from conceptual through final bidding. When you do create an invited bidders' list it will invite subs for multiple cost codes unless you tell it otherwise...every single time. This is a product of our sub data base being overpopulated with subcontractors performing work associated with multiple cost codes. But, for example, to assign a subcontractor only one division 5 cost code and not all division 5 cost codes I have to remove him from all the other Div 5 codes that I may be using in the estimate.
5. When I right change orders to the subs they are not grouped together but only in sequential order. And if I write an Owner CO with the sub CO's grouped together they show up in different parts of the screen so if I'm looking for a subs' last CO I have to look in two different places
6. Meeting minutes are horrible. You cannot simply create a new/updates status for items that get tracked from meeting to meeting.
7. Generating my Owner billing can be a huge pain because it will not let you bill more than a SOV line item has left in it. What if I needed or was required to bill more in Div 6 and less in Div 12? The only way to do that would be via creating a change order and then billing the added/subtracted amounts under a CO heading.
8. Reporting is a joke. One of the easiest and most often used reports is a "committed cost report". It doesn't exist when you go to the "reports" tab. However, you can print one if you go to the Purchase Order tab and run a report through that module. Stupid.

Now for something good:

1. Reviewing and approving subcontractor billings is easy
2. Paskr will automatically pull in subcontractor billings into my Owner billing which can be handy or a pain in the ass if you want to do something different.
3. RFI's are relatively easy to create, but who can screw that up?
4. Writing subcontracts is pretty effortless. Although, writing a subcontract to a cost code that wasn't in your final estimate can be a pain in the ass to make happen. And you cannot write a subcontract/PO to a vendor who doesn't have that particular cost code associated to him already.

Overall, P is rigid and not user friendly or flexible to how different Project Managers want to set up and run our jobs. I have used Timberline in the past and although Timberline is poor when it comes to customer support I would beg, borrow, or steal to have it over Paskr. I cuss P every single day and I use it for as few things as my company will allow. My number 1 goal for next year is to try and get away from Paskr.

Advice to Others

Avoid at all costs.

Our PM team has seen increase in productivity due to using Paskr. The bidding module saves time & is excellent for managing invitations & compiling sub bids. Paskr is fundamentally a solid tool for tracking the project's bottom line, housing documentation, & overseeing progress. There are endless possibilities for growth/improvement within the software with respect to document control, reporting, & accounting connectivity. Innovations can't come fast enough, as we are excited for the potential we see in Paskr.
The staff at Paskr has bent over backwards to please us & train our staff on Paskr processes. They are attentive & responsive to both us & our contacts. L1 needs more training to avoid providing misdirection. The support staff is amazing, but limited by the program itself & its functionality. More often than not our requests are left with "future enhancement" as a response.
As with any software there is a learning curve. We are slowly learning the Paskr process & developing work-arounds for its limitations. The platform is rudimentary & user-friendly but not necessarily intuitive. Therefore, it takes time to learn its idiosyncrasies (thank goodness for the chat feature).
Features & functionality are lacking from my perspective (accounting) as I rely heavily on reports. All reports are in pdf format & not customizable or interactive. Developing reports that allow you to click on figures & see what is behind them would be a huge leap in functionality for both the PM & accounting depts. Printing pdf reports & manually searching for data to audit is very time consuming for accounting & leaves the PM blindly accepting his/her entries.
The QB web connector is what drew us to the product over others, however it is very basic & requires manual massage of data to correct some glitches in the data transfer. Again a time consuming process (yet still quicker than our prior fully manual system).
Example of an area needing enhancement that would have tremendous impact: dashboard calendar. It could be a highly effective tool for PM team if it integrated task from all project for which they were assigned, allowing them to have full view from a single pane of glass.
Overall we are better with Paskr than we were before it. There is potential for Paskr to be so much more. As it improves our productivity will also improve, as will our staff's ability to convey the pulse of the business to our owner which was our primary reason for selecting Paskr software.

Pros

Bidding, billing, chat support, training library

Cons

reporting, contact database, sales tax