Last Tuesday I had 47 milestones set up for a 14 month school build in Austin, and one of my superintendents synced his phone wrong and wiped everything. Had to spend 3 hours on hold with support trying to recover the backup. Has anyone else had a sub or coworker mess up their data in a way that took forever to fix?
My PM Dave told me last year we didn't need Buildertrend for our crew of 5 guys doing residential remodels. I argued with him for weeks about it. He finally let me try it on one project a 3 month kitchen reno in Seattle. After dealing with all the setup time and features we never used, I checked our hours and we lost about 40 man hours just learning the system. He was totally right and now we're back to simple spreadsheets and Houzz Pro for scheduling. Has anyone else had a software sales pitch make you waste time on tools that don't fit your crew size?
He pulled up a single screen on his phone that had all our RFIs, submittals, and daily logs from the last 6 months and I was sold in 5 minutes, has anyone else had a construction vet totally flip how they see software?
I spent two years breaking my day into hourly blocks in Procore, but after missing a drywall delivery last month I realized I was too rigid and ignored the big picture. An old superintendent told me I was micromanaging the schedule instead of managing the workflow. Does anyone else find that daily planning makes you lose sight of the project's real pace?
Back in 2019 I had to choose between Procore and Buildertrend for studying the exam specs. I went with Procore because an old supervisor swore by it after a project in Phoenix. Honestly the learning curve was brutal the first month but it paid off when I passed my exam first try. Has anyone else had better luck with one over the other for certification?
My superintendent showed me how Procore links RFIs directly to submittals and it saved me 10 hours a week reconciling emails, has anyone else had that lightbulb moment with their software?
Had a job in Denver two years ago where this foreman, Mike, watched me log materials into my tablet and said 'Son, that app won't drive a single nail.' Stuck with me because he had a point about field guys not trusting digital tools. But last month I saw his crew using the same software to track rebar deliveries and save 3 hours of daily paperwork. Has anyone else had a hard time getting older tradesmen to buy into management software?
He grilled me about why I still use spreadsheets for tracking change orders, then pulled up Procore on his tablet and showed me 15 minutes of time saved in one demo. Has anyone else had a foreman or PM basically force you to switch software on the spot?
Back in March on a mixed-use job in Phoenix, my PM told me to stop logging every tiny change order in Procore. Said it was overkill and slowing us down. I followed his advice for two months. Then the owner came back asking for a full audit trail on $47,000 in scope changes. I had nothing. Spent three weeks digging through emails and paper scraps. Now I log everything again. Has anyone else gotten bad advice from an experienced guy that set you back?
Didn't really hit me until I saw the total material cost line at $8.3 million that I was tracking a building bigger than my whole hometown block in rural Ohio, has anyone else had that weird moment where a number in the software just didn't feel real until you compared it to something normal?
I was about to submit a material order for a whole floor of a hotel in Austin and the whole system went down for three hours. My supplier missed the cutoff and we had to pay for rush shipping which ate $1,400 out of the budget. Has anyone else had a software glitch cost them real money like that?
I was on a job in Phoenix and submitted a change order through Procore. The system auto-assigned it to the wrong approval chain and nobody caught it for 3 weeks. By the time we realized, the client had already signed off on the original scope and wanted to fight the extra cost. I had to bring in printouts from my field notes to prove the change was discussed in a meeting. Anyone else had Procore's routing system screw up a critical document like that?
My partner at our small firm in Columbus swears we need to drop $500 a month on Procore to stay organized. But I've been getting by with a free Trello board and Google Sheets for 6 months on a 12-unit apartment build and we haven't missed a deadline yet. Are we just lucky, or is the expensive stuff overkill for smaller crews? Who's had the opposite experience where cheap tools cost them time or money?
Was wondering why my material deliveries kept going to the wrong spot and my foreman kept sending me screenshots of where things actually were. Finally drove out there with him last Thursday and he pointed at the map on my phone. I had marked the staging area instead of the actual building pad when I set up the project in Procore. Felt like a complete idiot because I've been using this software for 2 years. Has anyone else made a stupid simple mistake like that and only figured it out way later?
My buddy who runs a crew in Denver told me last winter to stop using spreadsheets and go with cloud software for tracking jobs. I figured he was just pushing some fancy app, but I finally switched to Procore two months ago and it actually cut my paperwork time by about 4 hours a week. Has anyone else had someone give them advice on software that they doubted at first but turned out to be right?
Been looking at Nektar and Procore for our mid-size GC firm. Anyone have experience with either? Trying to figure out which one handles project tracking and crew coordination better.