Smart Contractor

For a small to medium sized construcition company this is the absolute best choice of software available. The program is simple to use, flexible and has a wide range of comprehensive reports. But the thing that makes this product stand out from the rest is the unsurpassed customer service. I have had many situations where I have contacted the members of the Smart Contractor team with questions or requests for enhancements to the program to meet special needs of our business and they have been incredible. They help me find ways to use the program more effectively and have even made several additions to the program to fulfill my requirements, imagine getting that kind of service from one of the box software companies (not likely). The team at SC is curteous, easy to reach and responsive to their customers needs, rare qualities in a company today. The product is perfect for our needs and knowing there is a knowledgable and responsive team behind it makes it a perfect choice.

Pros

This is by far the best construction software I have found. I tested at least 8 products ranging in price from $400 to $8,000 and Smart Contractor was the hands down winner. We run a general construction company with about 15 employees. I needed to track job costs and invoice customers as well as run reports for specific purposes like gathering workers comp information and vendor statement reconciliation. Although SC has the ability to be linked to Quickbooks, I am running it as a stand alone program and it is meeting all my needs. I did not want to use a double entry accounting software for job costing. I wanted the flexibility that SC allows by not requiring that everything flow through to general ledger accounts (although this is possible) SC is easy to use, intuitive, and has the absolute best customer service of any product I have ever used. It is simple to use yet provides all the information we need to evaluate job profitability and generate estimates and invoices.

Cons

Absolutely none. I only wish I had found it sooner as it has already helped us make management decisions from the information we have gathered using SC.

Pros

It is a good database and creates professional looking estimates and invoices.

Cons

The help section awful. I mean horrible. They provide minimal videos that get you started and excited about their product. The problem is that there are no videos to explain anything beyond the most basic functions. The help section of the software is deplorable and in order to learn how to do any process you have to search several items and put them together. Generally you still need to call support (which I will admit was very helpful, but if they were not I would have demanded a refund as the program would not work otherwise) to have them explain it and often the reason we could not get the software to work was because of a programming glitch or problems with smartcontractor communicating with Quickbooks. We have not used several of the functions we were told the software has simply because there are no instructions on how to use them unless you want to spend more (a lot more) money having them teach you what smartcontractor should have included instructions for, you are out of luck.

Advice to Others

Just because software can do something does not mean you will have the time to learn how to do it if there are no instructions. Be prepared to spend a lot of time and $ getting this software to work properly.