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Just found out my $89 a month estimating app has been quietly wrecking my bids for 7 weeks
I run a small remodeling crew out of Akron and picked up an estimating app back in March because I was tired of doing bids in spreadsheets at 11pm. It looked clean in the demo and the sales guy promised the material pricing updated live. Seven weeks in I noticed jobs were coming in weirdly low compared to my gut, so I pulled three old bids and rebuilt them by hand. The app was pulling lumber and drywall prices from a database that had not been touched since last fall, and I had already sent out 9 quotes using those numbers. I ate about $2,300 in margin on the two jobs that got signed before I caught it. Support told me the price feed "syncs on a regular cycle" which apparently means whenever they feel like it. I am not saying everyone should go back to pen and paper, but please check your material numbers against your actual supplier invoice before you send anything out. Has anyone found a tool that lets you plug in your own vendor pricing instead of trusting some central feed?
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alicesingh28d ago
I did the exact same thing with an app that promised live pricing on shingles, got burned on a roof job, then found out the "live" feed was a guy manually updating a spreadsheet twice a quarter. My favorite part was me defending the app to my lead guy when he said the numbers looked off. I told him it pulls from a national database, like I was some tech genius, while the app was quietly using prices from a catalog that expired before my dog was born. Now I just keep a running price sheet from my actual suppliers and punch it in myself, takes ten extra minutes but my gut and the numbers finally agree. That $2,300 sting is real though, feel for you.
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