ProContractor

Great

Kommentare: Excellent reporting.

Vorteile:

Ease of data entry, reporting. filtering, and quick access to information.

Nachteile:

Still have not incorporated project management as it's not as user friendly.

Accounting Admin Review

Kommentare: Difficult adjustment from my prior experience

Vorteile:

Works well for project cost accounting. The reports are good and have lots of options to drill down...

Nachteile:

I don't like the posting necessity of transactions, making adjustments through journal entries is too time consuming and makes the financials hard to follow for a non-accountant...

Accounting Is So Unforgiving

Kommentare: I am extremely unhappy with our accounting trainer. She kept saying that we could or could not do something in ProContractor and nearly every time we found out that the things she said we could do or could have done, in fact, couldn't be done. And the things she said we could NOT do is, in fact, allowed. For example, she told me and another lady in the office that the daily diaries could not be transferred over to the payroll side (that was a big selling point). When I told my boss what she said, he asked our estimating trainer and the estimating trainer said that yes, it could be done and showed the steps on how to do it. After that I tested it and yes, it can be done. There are other things, but you get my point. She also had me set up the payroll cost accounts a certain way and once we went live our comptroller found issues and she went to look at the payroll cost accounts and said that SOMEONE set them up wrong, she would never have set it up like that. When infact she had set them up, I just followed her instructions.

Vorteile:

Estimating module of this seems cool. There are a few un-necessary steps to transfer an estimate over to the accounting side, but I'm getting the hang of it. I guess I would like the part where the guys do their daily diaries via PC mobile IF I could get that to work. You can modify reports yourself, but the program you use is very picky. If you need to change one item, it's easy enough, but any major changes you will get error after error. It took me 5 solid days to modify a check; however, it took them 3 months to even get around to me.

Nachteile:

ACCOUNTING MODULE is a definite CON! 6 months training, very unforgiving- if you make a SIMPLE mistake it isn't an easy fix, they promised the world but in the end couldn't deliver, our accounting trainer messed us up more than she helped, PC Mobile doesn't work. Modifying reports is a hassle. SO many steps to enter a simple invoice- triple the steps than our previous system. The reports are awful! It's good that you can export them to excel, but they total everything like three times and it's difficult to sort the reports in a simple way. There are a million reports and most of them will never be used because they are useless; however, you can't get them out of your ALL tasks menu. So you have to find the one report in a million that you will use and save it to shortcuts. They didn't have a way to set up SC Contingency, our trainer was supposed to work on that- several weeks go by and she ends up having us set it up as a Fringe Benefit because she couldn't or didn't get the developers on board to fix that. I know we aren't the only Company in SC that has this program. The paid time off was a complicated mess for a company that just has a set rate for employees per year (not accrued). There are other issues but they aren't popping out in my head right now. I wish I had put a stop to this in the very beginning.

Great All in One System for those upgrading from QuickBooks

Kommentare: We are a specialty subcontractor with seven entities doing approximately $50M/revenue, have been growing double digits since ProContractor installation and have been ProContractor users for approximately 3.5 years.

Vorteile:

ProContractor is a great all in one integrated system, housing all needs of our business, from estimating and project management through HR (not enrollment) and accounting. All modules are communicating mostly seamlessly and it handles our many intercompany transactions without issue. In addition, for someone who was new to the construction industry as an accounting professional when I started using ProContractor, I found it incredibly user friendly and easy to navigate!

Nachteile:

As someone who is not extremely IT savvy, my biggest complaint is the out of the box reporting capabilities. Because of the module design, often you can't combine multiple attributes of two different modules into one report, instead you download the information and work with it in Excel. In addition, project management reporting is lacking, especially from a budget to actual perspective, despite all of the necessary information being there (this is from an accounting perspective, but I don't often hear that from our project managers). Also, the journal entry process is extremely cumbersome - I don't understand why they can't just design an Excel upload template. Finally, from a customer service perspective, I typically find them to be very responsive; however, for tougher questions or training needs, it is difficult to get them to dedicate time to you or follow-up unless you are persistent (i.e. they always want to try to knock it all out in a one hour phone call). Having said that though, some of our issues are self driven in that we skimped on a few attributes of original adoption/integration in order to save a few dollars.

Highly potent if you understand the value proposition

Vorteile:

First, it should be noted that ProContractor is an entity owned and maintained by Viewpoint Construction Software. If anything, my experience has improved since VCS' acquisition of Maxwell Systems. ProContractor does a magnificent job for medium-sized contractors who require some costing rigor in addition to an integrated software package (i.e., including accounting, project management, and estimation in one piece). However, despite the seductiveness of the product's marketing, a considerable amount of thought needs to be invested in determining, analyzing, and comparing your present internal processes from estimation to project closeout with what ProContractor offers. In other words, do not let the marketing materials do the thinking on such a crucial decision for you. ProContractor was designed with industry best practices regarding workflow as well as internal controls in mind, not necessarily simplicity (as with QuickBooks). Many complaints pertinent to supposed extraneous steps actually tie back to how the software, through an impressive yet simple permissions infrastructure, can control who (for example, in accounts payable) enters invoices, approves them, selects them for payment, prints (i.e., has access to) the checks, and posts the transactions. Shortcuts are inexpensive until you realize how expensive fraud and lost trust can become.

Nachteile:

I do not dislike this software or the vendor, but this is an excellent opportunity to address points made by others who are dissatisfied with the product, for their disappointment deserves attention from even the most satisfied customer. When my firm adopted ProContractor and dumped QuickBooks Enterprise three years ago (just prior to my hiring, actually), we chose something that was decidedly less impressive upon implementation than presented to the directors during a trade show in Las Vegas. No thought had been given as to how our processes would align with ProContractor's intuition of proper workflow, because we were primarily concerned about fully integrating the firm's processes and procedures within the software ecosystem. We went live in three months flat after intense scrutiny of our costing, project management, and estimation procedures, humbling ourselves along the way through reconciling what we thought we knew with ProContractor's processes architecture and internal controls logic. Granted, we had suggestions (and lots of them) that were heard. Many of them, such as the lien management feature and many of the improvements in iPad integration, can be tied directly to our recommendations. Ultimately, we were satisfied, but that was because our expectations were not to invest in a system that would cater to ourselves without acceptance of potentially radical change, but rather to develop a relationship with the software and vendor that was founded on a trust of the system's logic. From there, we could use the system as a mirror to check our understanding of our business versus how it can function even more efficiently.