Between project management, accounting, and winning new work, juggling everything in a construction business isn’t easy, especially without the right tools. Time is money, and the more energy spent wrangling countless Excel sheets and email chains means less time spent growing your business.
One of the most important improvements you can make as you scale your business is to build a tech stack that supports your most important day-to-day operations. With the right construction software, you can easily manage finances, organize projects, create bids, and so much more, all in a fraction of the time. And the less time you spend on the tedious, time-consuming tasks, the more efficient and competitive you can be.
A solid construction tech stack includes three to four types of software: estimating, construction management, accounting, and in certain cases, service management.
Key Takeaways
- Generic software and apps can help get your construction company off the ground, but they’re not a good long-term solution. Instead, look for platforms that are built specifically for the construction industry.
- Most small contractors only need software that can accomplish three tasks: accounting, construction management, and estimating. If you’re in a specialized trade like electrical or plumbing though, you’ll find a service management platform helpful too.
- Certain integrations work within your construction software to make data management much easier.
- If you can find multiple construction software solutions that ‘talk’ easily to each other, you’ll be way ahead of most other companies. Less data entry and fewer silos means better estimates and better profitability.
What Types of Software Do Contractors Need?
Manually entering everything into spreadsheets can only get you so far. If you want to scale your construction company sustainably, you’ll need a few tools to make that happen. Thankfully, you only really need a few types of construction software to build a solid tech stack.
Construction Accounting Software
One of the trickiest parts of being a contractor is managing the cash flow. Construction accounting is an entirely different beast than accounting in most industries, and small mistakes here and there can quickly add up. A good construction accounting software will make sure you’re never in the dark when it comes to your finances.
Along with simplifying financial management, a construction accounting software will help you:
- Track expenses
- Submit progress billings
- Manage change orders
- Improve cash flow
- Ensure compliance on the job
Our Recommendation: Most accounting software is too generic to be helpful in construction. If you want something with all the standard accounting features that also includes everything emerging contractors need to grow, look no further than CrewCost. With construction accounting, job costing, and time tracking all in one application, you’ve got everything you need to take full control over your profitability.
Construction Management Software
Just like accounting, project management in construction is different, and generic tools don’t account for all the nuances of a job. To keep jobs organized and on schedule, you need a way to combine every piece of information, every construction document, and every communication under one roof.
Construction management software makes that task much less overwhelming. By organizing schedules, resources, and communications together, you can streamline workflows, and improve your team’s productivity both on and off the field.
Our Recommendation: From preconstruction to closeout, Procore offers top-notch tools for contractors at any business stage. With tools for quality/safety control, communications, resource management, and more, Procore’s tools help you avoid surprises and stay ahead of the game.
Estimating Software
Trying to calculate everything manually for construction takeoff is frustrating at best, and leaves plenty of room for error. If you want to protect your margin (and make sure you’re not working for free), you need a way to produce accurate, error-free bids and proposals every time. Estimating software takes the guesswork out of the process, so you can save time and ultimately win more bids.
Our Recommendations: Procore Estimating and Stack Construction Technologies are always our top recommendations for construction estimating software. Both offer flexible pricing structures, and both offer a user-friendly interface to help contractors create detailed, accurate estimates and job proposals.
Service Management Software
If you’re a general contractor, you’ll most likely be set with just construction accounting, construction management, and construction estimation software. But if your company has a service component (electrical, mechanical, plumbing, etc), having a strong service management software is critical to your work.
A service management software makes managing repairs and maintenance much more efficient, so you can shorten response times and leave your customers happier.
Our Recommendation: BuildOps is an all-in-one service management software with a suite of tools to streamline the entire service workflow and make sure each task is matched with the right technician. From initial quotes to closeout, BuildOps has all the tools you need to get the job done.
How Data Integrations Help Your Tech Stack Work Together
Software integrations allow you to combine separate programs (or parts of them) together into one system so they can share data and work together. This is absolutely critical in construction, where one small thing slipping through the cracks can cause major issues down the line.
By reducing silos and eliminating duplicate data entry, you can make sure your entire business ecosystem is working together, not against itself. Centralized data also makes sharing information across multiple teams much easier, so you can avoid adding more manual work to your plate, and ensure more accurate reporting.
Our Recommendations: Third parties like Zapier are a go-to for plenty of folks, and offer a wide suite of integrations compatible with almost every software out there. If you’re looking for a construction-specific ecosystem, we recommend exploring Agave. Agave in particular makes it incredibly easy to normalize data and move it between different systems.
Tips On Choosing the Right Construction Software
What works for one business may not for another. Before you go all-in on a construction software, make a list of your company’s biggest goals, wants, and current needs. The software you pick should ideally align with most, if not all of them. As you look through your options, you’ll also want to consider:
- Cost: Does it fit within your budget? Check to see if the company offers tiered or scalable pricing based on your business size.
- Integration capabilities: Does the software support third-party integrations? If not, you may end up spending more time and money than you’d like just to get the same functionality.
- Scalability: Can it handle a sudden uptick in your workload? Any good construction software should be able to perform without hiccups, no matter how busy you get.
Along with talking to each company’s customer success team, ask for a free trial so you can experience the platform for yourself and see if it’s right for your business.
Wrapping Up
The right software can get your construction business over the challenges you come up against when you are trying to scale and grow. And the more proactive you are in making this investment, the quicker you’ll put your business on the fast-track to long-term success.
Why not get one piece of your stack taken care of and try CrewCost free for 30 days? You’ll get everything you need to take care of your accounting needs, all in one easy-to-use app.