Hello, I'm looking for some advice.

[alexwolf]

Hello,

I'm looking to potentially start a construction contractor business. I'll be working with someone who has 20+ years experience in construction industry. However, this was sometime ago and in a different country.

I'm currently in the research phase. I'm looking for either basic and cheapish software that provides estimation for material and labour, or a guide book that has this information, or an online database that contains this info.

If there are other resources on or offline that you think will be useful, i'm all ears.

Cheers!

Alex

[Bobthebuilder]

Alex. There are several bits of software out there that purport to do estimating but in my experience none do it very well. The reason is that none can deal with the very wide range of circumstances you typically find. For this reason, most are better at estimating for new builds far better than refurbishment projects. I perseveared with 3 different well known software packages for a while and now use an in-house system which we have developed over the years. Even with a database of material and labour costs at your finger tips, you still need to input labour time and nothing short of experience will help much in this regard. Construction is an incredibly hard industry and my advice would be to spend a bit of time working along side someone else for a while who has pricing experience. When you buy your materials in future, record what you pay for them in a simple database/spreadsheet then build your price using a spreadheet template that you can use over and over again. Thats my advise. Good luck with your new venture.

[alexwolf]

Alex. There are several bits of software out there that purport to do estimating but in my experience none do it very well. The reason is that none can deal with the very wide range of circumstances you typically find. For this reason, most are better at estimating for new builds far better than refurbishment projects. I perseveared with 3 different well known software packages for a while and now use an in-house system which we have developed over the years. Even with a database of material and labour costs at your finger tips, you still need to input labour time and nothing short of experience will help much in this regard. Construction is an incredibly hard industry and my advice would be to spend a bit of time working along side someone else for a while who has pricing experience. When you buy your materials in future, record what you pay for them in a simple database/spreadsheet then build your price using a spreadheet template that you can use over and over again. Thats my advise. Good luck with your new venture.

Thanks for the advice Bobthebuilder. But if i'm not mistaken like in many other contries there should a standard by which estimations are made. Longer term plan I will be building out my own database to keep track of cost and etc. Working with with someone will be too costly, where as a one off payment for a decent software or book is better longer term investment.

If you could name few softwares you used, that would be great.

Cheers!

Alex