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Is big investment software really better than free options?
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?
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ellis.mia16d ago
Free Trello and Sheets can work fine for a 12 unit build where you're looking at one project at a time. But scale that to three projects running at once with different subs and material deliveries, and the cracks start showing fast. We tried going cheap on a 20 unit townhouse project and spent way too many hours digging through spreadsheets trying to figure out who ordered the wrong windows. That $500 a month starts to look pretty cheap when it saves you just one big reorder.
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margaret_williams516d ago
Windows mix up sounds like a bonehead mistake, not a tool problem.
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seanlee16d ago
Right, because when you're juggling three projects, the spreadsheets just magically sort themselves out. Nothing like spending a whole afternoon figuring out who ordered the wrong windows to make that $500 feel like stealing.
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