Procore

Admittedly, I fought the use of Procore by my firm for a while. As it became a more prevalent tool used by contractors on my projects on a regular basis I was more or less forced to learn how to use it. In the end, I'm moderately satisfied with the functions that I'm most concerned about as an architect such as tracking RFI's and submittals, creating custom logs and tracking field issues. The bulk of the set up work was performed by the general contractors in each instance as they are using the software for accounting purposes as well. The ability to track drawing changes and updates is also very handy.

While I am still happy to use this software to make the contractor's life easier, it is still a bit cumbersome. The ability to apply multiple sorting fields to RFI's and submittals is a nice feature, but cumbersome to load on the webpage. At times it seems that there are perhaps too many options, especially when trying to create something simple such as a "Open RFI" template to use for meetings. And speaking of meetings, the meeting minute layout within the program is, to put it mildly, garbage. The software is clearly written with the contractor in mind, as if the CA process on the design team side is almost an afterthought. On my most recent project, I had to work with the GC and Procore in order to have the proper RFI and submittal routing established so items don't sit in limbo and become late.

Strong Project Management capability including Contact Management per job, Submittal & RFIs workflows and approvals with ease of communication on mobile devises. Also, syncing with Microsoft Project schedules is a time-saver, and allows views for updated project schedules in calendars. On a customer support level, I did find the live chat very helpful as well as all the Procore tutorials on the various features. I also greatly valued how documents could be uploaded and the system would recognize the drawing page references and label accordingly when saving.

Insufficient as a sole source for accounting services, and does not support information transfers in/out of QuickBooks desktop versions (even with support of Procore connectors). Therefore, accounting team needs to duplicate efforts and manually update prime contracts. Additionally, the accounting module does not really communicate with the project management module so challenged to know as a team what stage project is in, and no easy way to get budget forecasts. Also, navigation around the program was not very logical and user-friendly for many staff members. Lastly, when we experienced a big hurdle with the accounting features, it took months to speak to a support representative who could talk through the issues. Perhaps if Procore would have had a more flexible subscription option, and allow for use of the PM tools without paying for the tools we couldn't implement, we would have wanted to continue our subscription longer.