# Earthwork & Utility Estimating Software



## brayconst (Oct 25, 2012)

Welp, 

To begin with, we've been looking at two different programs and wanted to get some feed back from fellow dirt bunnies. Our company has been doing nothing but bid the last three years, and about out of every 50-60 jobs bid, we will get one. Im spending 7/8 of my time stuck in front of my screen instead of making money with our toys. First program we are looking at, and currently leaning towards is Insite Sitework.

Seems like everything we need as we do everything from demo, concrete, asphalt, utilities, excavation and over ex pads. The stickler they want 8k bucks for the program user fees, and this gets us three years of program use. Big pill to swallow, but if it gets my ass back in the seat of my hoe ill take it. 

The second program is Roctek International, they're asking about the same price but doesn't seem to very user friendly. Being a young buck, i don't believe Id have a difficult time with either programs, but my old man sure as hell loves his ruler and yellow notepad. 

I would also love to hear others inputs on different programs. 

Thanks


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## GregB (Jan 8, 2016)

It may be too much for you but B2W Estimate is outstanding in many ways. We bought it originally about 20 years ago when it was Niche Software Bid2Win. About 2000, the company changed their name to Bid2Win. More recently the company is now called B2W Software and the product is now called Estimate. It certainly scales to far larger than your needs so the question would be how low is the entry price. We bought it to replace a purchase of Hard Dollar. Our experience with Hard Dollar was probably the worst of all software purchases ever. We have 3 full-time estimators, who also use Agtek takeoff software. Two other users work with B2W Estimate entering data and project management. We have a full-time in house manager of field projects that uses B2W Estimate constantly.

B2W software support is simply the best I've ever experienced in 37 years of computer software use. They are available 24x7 and I've tested that by calling them at 6am one Easter Sunday doing an upgrade. They were back to me in 20 minutes and then worked until the problem was solved, which was due to a glitch in our custom bid sheet, which some old-school people require to be output on 3 different colors of paper - a hold over from dot matrix output on multi part forms. There are NO entry level idiots in customer support to work through to get to someone that knows what they are doing. We run about a million dollars worth of software and they are the best of all in support. If they come out with accounting software, I will dump our current software and switch and we were the original general engineering software beta test site for that construction software.


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## dayexco (Mar 4, 2006)

It's how you fill in the blanks is how you get jobs. No software package will give you that magic number. 

Keeping track of time and costs on prior jobs to establish a benchmark is what's needed. 

All I ever used was excel. 

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk


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## JDEERE (Feb 3, 2015)

I agree with GregB. I have spent a good 2 years evaluating software for estimating. I even attended some seminars on different software programs I was considering to purchase. After all this, I decided B2W was the best choice for the money. It was far from cheap, but that doesn't matter in the long run if it makes you money. It's like I tell my guys, I don't care if an excavator costs $250,000.00, as long as it pays for itself and makes money on top of that, I'm happy. I have coupled 
B2W with Carlson take-off and after many, many years of moving the earth, I feel like my estimates are solid, not guesstimates.


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