General Advice: Simplifying Tools and Clearing the Way?

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Hi,

We are a small residential construction company that has adopted Buildertrend, an industry specific tool, over the past year. It does a lot of things well enough, but it struggles with tasks, especially recurring ones or ones that we might want to create some more documentation around (I got into the ProcessDriven.co people’s SOP system).

As a result, we have continued to use Asana, but it feels like just another silo, to go along with our siloed, manually entered data in google sheets and our siloed data in airtable.

I once built a complex airtable database to manage a catering business, track time, show profitability, but never could quite get it to do everything . It was also 2017-2019

Now I am thinking about this topic again. Should I reach out to Polina? Does the community have some advice?

https://lookfar.fibery.io/@public/Meeting_Notes

Note: There is some appetite to adopt new software if it replaces one (or ideally 2) existing tools.

I plan to figure out what I’m proposing in the short term, as well as a long term vision and share it with the management team (I am one of 3). We will be the principal users at first.

Ideas for low threshold to start using it:

-Whiteboarding, Retrospective, Tracking of Issues and Team Meeting Notes with Action Steps and Assignment. Managing the Project of building a business alongside the project management tasks that we can’t /don’t want to fit into buildertrend

-Receive data from Google Sheets/mirror data to google sheets for selections, ordering and shipping/receiving of products to be installed

  • Long Term: A replacement for buildertrend (but I am pretty skeptical that this would work)

Buildertrend is very closed. It is quite annoying, but maybe there is a way to use a webscraper or a regular export of schedule items?

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Hi,

I am not an expert in construction industry, but if a company already adopted a tool like Buildertrend, it will be hard to replace (and maybe even harmful). While Fibery is generic and can fit many processes, very specific and deep processes it will not handle well most likely, since vertical tools tend to nail very very specific details, where Fibery will fail. For example, Finance module is hard. Maybe Fibery will not handle it well, or client portal. It is hard to say for sure, but I’d check many details before deciding to move to Fibery from a specialized software like this. I should add that Buildertrend looks like a tool from 2000.

Airtable, Asana, Miro and Google Spreadsheets are easier targets, at least it looks like that from a shared whiteboard.

If you need consulting services from us, we provide them for $100/h. If you just want to have a call and discuss things in some details, we do have a solution architect who will be happy to do it for free.

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Hey @davidh,

I thought I’d give my two cents. I’m part of a 12 person construction/electrical team and we’re are working through a similar process of consolidating processes and tools in Fibery.

We started with Buildertrend + QuickBooks but found that it didn’t work great for cost-plus construction, especially due to the limited/inflexible tracking categories. We kept QuickBooks for our accountant and moved our project tracking to spreadsheets using CSI Codes. We use the spreadsheet for internal tracking and share a condensed version of it with our clients. This solved our tracking structure issues, but came with a lot of manual work and all the normal spreadsheet issues. We also had to move our gantt charts and documentation to other tools, TeamGantt and Notion respectively. This is still our current workflow and while it works, there is definitely some room for improvement.

Our solution (WIP) is to replace this entire stack with QuickBooks, QuickBooks Time, and Fibery. I’m not a huge fan of QuickBooks by any means, but most accountants in our area request it, and as @mdubakov says, finance is probably very hard to do properly in Fibery.

We input expenses, time entries (via QuickBooks time), customers and any other relevant data into Quickbooks. This data is synced to Fibery using a Custom Integration. I am currently working on one that could be self-hosted or maybe the Fibery team would consider making one if there is enough interest. Once the data is in Fibery it can be used as starting point for most of the processes that you might want. Sub-customers/jobs can correspond to projects and be the starting place for schedule, documentation, and task tracking. Expenses and time entries can be grouped by type and customer to make budget tracking sheets. I find that if you are willing to put in the work, most internal processes can be mapped pretty well.

We are still very much WIP, but I would be happy to post again when we make some more progress with some actual examples. Just wanted to share some thoughts as someone who is passionate about how much most construction software sucks and how rad Fibery is!

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How fortuitous! I will continue exploring how we can capture everything outside of buildertrend, including issue tracking as it relates to strategic goals and actions that come out of retrospectives/premortems/learning reviews.

Maybe I will also pull in our Airtable database (tracks selections, ordering, receiving, returns, O&M manuals, used to do subcontracts, lien releases, etc. via link to esignatures.io api… but that’s another story for another day).

I will reach out as I have time to fibery team and hopefully connect with you down the road! We are a residential builder in Oakland, where are you based?

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Very nice, just checked out some of your projects, nice looking stuff! We are based in the San Juans Islands in Washington State.