Construction and trades businesses have been running the same job management, estimating, and site administration software for 15 or 20 years in many cases. It works — or it did — and switching is disruptive. But at some point the software stops running, the vendor disappears, or a Windows upgrade breaks everything.

The construction software problem

Construction software is often deeply customised to the way a specific business operates — job codes, cost centres, variation tracking, subcontractor management, retention calculations. This specificity is valuable. It’s also what makes the software hard to replace.

Common situations:

• A trades-specific quoting or job management tool has become unsupported
• The company’s estimating system won’t run on a new laptop
• Years of job history, supplier pricing, and project data are trapped in an old system
• A building software company was acquired and the product is being wound down
• The office manager who ran everything retired and took their knowledge with them

What I do

• Job history and project data recovery from legacy systems
• Estimating data extraction — price lists, material rates, labour rates
• Supplier and subcontractor contact record migration
• Financial history extraction for handover to new accounting software
• Documentation of business logic — how jobs are costed, how variations are calculated
• Migration planning to modern construction management platforms

Common platforms I work with

Cheops, Timberline, BuildSoft, Jobpac, and a range of custom-built quoting and job management systems. Also VB6, Access, and FoxPro-based systems built by developers who are no longer available.

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