Between scheduling, estimating, accounting, subcontracting and more, builders juggle their work every day. Choosing the appropriate software can help builders juggle tasks with lesser fear of items slipping through their fingers. And fewer mistakes, greater efficiency, tighter scheduling and the like all will affect their bottom line. We talked to four builders, each using a different program to achieve similar results.

Quest Solutions

Outgrowing one's estimating practices is a problem builders might welcome, but it may come at a price. Gary Duncan, president of Sentinel Builders in Knoxville, Tenn., knew that as his business grew, it needed the type of structure that could feed such growth.

A main decision he made was to shift Sentinel's estimating process from an Excel spreadsheet base to a fully-automated system. That also meant whatever estimating software he picked had to cooperate with Master Builder, which he was using for scheduling and accounting. He found Quest Solutions at the International Builders' Show and hasn't looked back.

"We had been using Excel for estimating, and we actually wrote our own scheduling program, but it wasn't cutting it," says Duncan. "We really needed to make our whole system complete and more structured. I was very impressed with how [Quest's] estimating software worked, and especially how it integrated with Master Builder."

Duncan says he appreciated the simplicity of Quest's software, which offers modules called Visual Assemblies. It took about a year for Duncan to fully integrate the software and structure his cost database for Sentinel, a company that concentrates on multifamily, condo and custom-built residential markets.

"The learning curve is actually a good thing, in that you learn a lot about how your own business really works in the process," Duncan says.

Visual Assemblies gives builders tools for quickly estimating jobsite necessities, such as concrete slabs, wood framing, brick or block walls and roofs, and everything is tied into the cost database.

The results were widespread for Sentinel in terms of accuracy, efficiency, stability and, ultimately, profits. "It has built up my confidence in the templates I use, and I feel like I can really trust the final reports and tracking information that it generates," Duncan says. "Before, it would take us one week to estimate a job from start to finish. Now it only takes three to five hours. Any tool that lets me find out in a matter of hours whether a job is going to be profitable is exactly what I was looking for."

Duncan says the company has increased profitability by 50 percent since implementing Quest software. Sentinel has doubled the number of jobs it's bidding, and the company has added employees who are easily trainable on the software because of its simplicity. One local homebuilder, Clarion Homes, used Duncan's company as its model and began using Quest. That's something Duncan's father, who also has a construction company, has not done -- yet. "Last year he did more volume than I did," Duncan says, "but I beat him when it came to profitability."
www.questsolutions.com

Intuit

Like graduating from one level of school to another, Santa Monica, Calif.-based builder George Minardos has taken several steps with Intuit software. He has stepped from Quicken to QuickBooks to QuickBooks Pro and now Master Builder, which he has relied upon for more than a decade to run Minardos Construction and Associates.

Minardos uses Master Builder's construction management software for its estimating, production, accounting and analysis programs. In his company of about 25 employees, workers have been trained on whatever programs match their job skill set. Minardos says training is relatively simple and employees or temps can learn program specifics in one day.

"Everybody in our company is using the software," he says. "Individuals within the company don't need to use the whole package, but it's really important before using a fully integrated software package that someone high up understands the concept of the entire program."

Minardos' company is a specialty general contractor dealing with both commercial and residential projects. With cycles of three to nine months for preconstruction and 14-18 for the custom residential construction, the company works five to six concurrent projects. Minardos says Master Builder has helped the company prepare for development projects. "The ability to access relatively real-time data is paramount in the development world," says Minardos. "You're always comparing estimates to your actual costs."

Minardos looked at three-, six- and nine-month goals for the transition from QuickBooks Pro, and says that the switch was fairly smooth. The accounting, tracking and organizational benefits could be seen quickly. "Some of it we weren't doing very well before using separate programs," Minardos says.

His estimates are more complete and more accurate -- down to a 3 percent margin of error and omissions compared with 10-15 percent in the past, he says. And with every employee well-versed in the software, efficiency is particularly felt in the field. "I'd say my employees are 30 percent more productive than your average employees," says Minardos. "There's a well-known number in the industry that 50 percent of the time you're either waiting for information or materials, so if you can use that time to do other things, you can achieve major efficiency."
www.intuit.com

UDA Technologies

Three years ago, Tom Lasley implemented UDA Technologies' Construction Office software and he and his company, Asheville, N.C.-based Lasley Construction Company, have been reaping the rewards since.

His company, with its half-dozen employees, works on eight to 12 projects per year with a mix of single-family custom, single-family spec and town homes spec work. According to Lasley, profits have tripled since he began using UDA's software for planning, estimating, specifications and contracts in concert with QuickBooks Pro. "I've been able to dramatically increase our volume of work, which has allowed me to branch off into land development and multiunit construction," Lasley says. "The financial management, from estimating, cost analysis, scheduling, billing, accounting through to the very end is all done with UDA."

Lasley says the key to Construction Office's capabilities is its seamless and thorough integration with QuickBooks. His time spent on day-to-day business activities has decreased substantially since he switched from the pencil-and-paper method. "The minute I finish estimating, I can export it to QuickBooks," Lasley says.

Along with time saved, Lasley says the software has improved accuracy for his accounting and paper trail of expenditures tenfold. It helps him ensure that invoices and expenses are allocated to the right people and keeps him up to date on how his budget stands for a project. "Every day when I spend a penny, I know where it fits in my budget," he says. "I can do a lot of preventative intervention."

Lasley also raves about the company's technical support, which he says spent hours assisting him at many turns.
www.udatechnologies.com

BuildTopia

When Mike Neary was hired by Lacrosse Homes, the Stevensville, Md.-based company was trying to become a production homebuilder that finishes 350 houses a year. As custom home division manager, Neary was asked to assess the company's systems in its effort to transition from custom to production building. They decided that they needed a better management system.

In January 2004, Neary became BuildTopia Administrator for the company and began implementing BT's Builder, Service and Sales software as Lacrosse continued its shift from custom.

"In the past, we were a mixture of custom and production, because the consumer would come in and buy a standard house but modify everything inside -- we build our 'Augusta' model 15 different ways," Neary says. "We wanted to take a house plan and build it the same way every time, allowing customers to personalize with certain packages and controllable options. BuildTopia was able to track those individually with all house types."

Lacrosse, which focuses on small-lot development projects, has increased its production from 84 houses in 2003 to an estimated 250 this year. Average cycles have dwindled from preconstruction of five months to two months and construction from six months to four. The company has added 22 employees over the last two years, and sales per employee have risen from $900,000 to $1.5 million in that span. "Did BuildTopia do all this for us? No, but it organized everything a little bit differently so we could see it and adapt to it," Neary says. "It's the No. 1 catalyst for our success."

Contracts that used to take sales managers three hours to hand write now take a few mouse clicks, Neary says (thus contracts for a recent 52-home project took a day instead of 156 hours). Using BuildTopia has helped Lacrosse cut down on building houses "backward" and structure its options pricing. The company is able to identify where bottlenecks are in the cycle and cut them off before they arise.

"We used to tell customers that we'd build a house and it could be 15 months, it could be 11 months-can you imagine being the customer and hearing that? Now we can look them straight in the eye and say you're going to be in the house in seven or seven-and-a-half months," Neary says. "You want to be as accurate with the customer as possible."
www.buildtopia.com