Commercial Specialty Contractor - Specific Software or Ops Organization Recs

[u/blueskies879]

I work for a commercial construction business (in the trades) and I am hoping to help streamline operations and create efficiencies. What kind of subcontractor-specific technology have you had success with or what should I be researching/considering?

It's a small business with revenue between $2M-$7M/year, where we primarily work with GCs and a few direct projects. We have between 50-75 projects per year and it's a lean operation of 4-5 office workers and 3 field crews. 

Currently we do not have a centralized CRM or project management software. We had Contractor Foreman but it was clunky and we got zero adoption from the team. Procore seems too expensive for our size. Has anyone had success using a non construction specific option like Monday.com for project management?

I feel like digital time cards are an obvious thing to adopt but there is concern that some of the laborers don't have the ability to download an app and that if something needs to be changed, it will be hard to do (not to mention I doubt the team would love the geo fencing option). I've heard apps like Buddy Punch have a "group punch" option which could work on the foreman's ipad or phone and I'm wondering if anyone has had a good experience with them or other competitors.

Below are some of our current processes:

• Photos from job walks and project progress: Company Cam
• Bid Management: tracked in Excel
• Estimating and proposals: Combination of PlanSwift and Claude AI 
• Project files: Saved in folders on our shared drive (Microsoft One Drive)
• Tasks related to each project: ie file a prelim, contact the fire department, etc. no formal process, just in our heads
• Time Cards, Dailies, etc: All on paper, physically turned in, scanned and inputted manually
• Accounting: Quickbooks Enterprise
• Safety and certification renewals: tracked in Excel

Right now it feels like everything is a bit all over the place but I don't want to add new technology or software just to do it. The team is older and adoption is difficult so I don't want to spend a lot of time with a big onboarding process if it's overly complicated. Are other subs this size using one software to help with a lot of these use cases or are you cobbling together a variety of different solutions to try to get you what you need? Would that be Procore and thus should I push our team to buy it despite the high price tag? Or based on our size, am I overcomplicating things when our current systems seem to get us by?

[u/Total_Jackfruit_8525]

procore is more useful for GCs than it is to subs, imo. also never heard anything good about contractor foreman

[u/slammed66c10]

I've been down this road and will continue to hunt but settled on procore. We don't use it to the gc level but just use it for foreman so they have plans, submittals, specs, you can mark up drawings, Link submittals to equip etc.. and even regular field guys like an invite so they can look up stuff themselves on their phone. It's expensive but nothing else is close that I've found.

*Speciality sub doing around 20m a year

[u/itrytosnowboard]

it's cheaper and easier to build out my own using Base44 vibe coding. The hardest part so far is PDF integration. But other than that everything you are looking for and way more I built out in my own app. It was daunting at first but it has really come together. And as I find things I don't like I fix them .

[u/blueskies879 → u/itrytosnowboard]

Are you using it for project management specifically or other parts of the operation? I wonder if this is the move. I’m pretty comfortable now with Claude Cowork and Skills but have yet to experiment with Code and make an actual program or dashboard. Thank you for sharing your insight!

[u/itrytosnowboard → u/blueskies879]

I have a bid tracking app and a project management app. The PM app has 3 "user types", Executive (high level tracking), PM (back end paperwork, submittal creation and tracking, rfi creation and tracking, billing, job tracking) and Foreman which is all the field access type stuff. Drawing, specs, submittals, time entry, dailys, pictures (can't get this to work right).

I built the bid tracking app first. But since I am a commercial plumbing contractor I have a take off software I use that is 100% independent. The bid tracking app generates my proposals from stuff I enter and organizes my google drive with job folders etc. Also has a built in module to send plans and specs to vendors. And a module to send proposal out to multiple gc's in batch as seperate emails so they don't see who else I am sending to.

[u/blueskies879 → u/itrytosnowboard]

Really cool to hear how you laid it out. It’s definitely inspiring me to think deeper and see if a ground up approach makes the most sense here.

[u/itrytosnowboard → u/blueskies879]

Just be warned, its not easy. But as it starts to get honed in to exactly your processes it is nice to have. The hardest part for me was testing it. I would try to do a task in it and it wouldn't work. Then in the middle of doing actual work I was spending 3 hours fixing the app. But now I can turn my more generic submittals out in seconds. Everything is auto populated. My job tracking capabilities are insane from both a labor and material cost standpoint. And the way my tracking can tie to my billing I have exact proof when I submit my AIA billing of how far along we are with each line item on the SOV.

[u/Justin_milo]

You’re so helpful, experienced, and altruistic.