So I watched a video today about CoConstruct Estimating and Donnie Wyatt the founder and President of CoConstruct 37 seconds into the video made the claim…
…I’m going to show you something you’d never see somewhere else. Second of all is I am never going to enter the same piece of information twice that’s because co-construct is the only single entry estimating system you put that information in once and it flows all the way through so you’re going to see the two of those together and how only co-construct does it in just a few minutes.
Not True. Not True at all
My 360 Difference Software which began its life as an Estimating program back in the late 1990s has always been a single entry estimating system and that is in fact why I first built the system in FileMaker Pro because FileMaker Pro was the development tool that gave me that capability when they introduced FileMaker 3.0 with its relational architecture back in December of 1995. I hated all the time that was wasted on data entry and wanted a solution that when I typed in a client’s or subcontractor name it automatically “looked up” the address and phone number information I already had in the system and added it to the estimate and in the case of the subcontractor also looked up information to see if their insurance certificates I had on file were up to date {see below).
To be perfectly clear I am not in anyway knocking CoConstuct as a product. It is arguably one of the best and most comprehensive tools out there but 360 Difference Estimating does have many of the same features although I often go about displaying the data differently. However, unlike CoConstuct, the layouts and even the code that runs 360 Difference can be customized to meet individual customer clients branding and even their data entry and use workflows. 360 Difference while a fully functioning program out of the box can also be modified to work the way YOU want it to work.
FileMaker Pro which runs natively on Mac, Windows, and iOS platforms has come a long way since the 1990s and the program also now runs via a technology called WebDirect that also allows users to run custom apps built using the program through a web browser extending the devices that can run programs to Android devices too.
…And 360Difference has ALWAYS been a single entry Estimating System and in fact has been that way since 1995.
