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Anonymous
02-23-2005, 05:49 PM
Do any of you guys know of another program out there for proposals and/line diagrams. I am a custom installer and am not totally satisfied with Monolith or D-Tools.

Jerry
02-23-2005, 07:55 PM
I'll trade you my Horizon for your D-tools!

ToddBAdams
02-23-2005, 08:19 PM
This is what I understand about software. it is fairly straightforward to get sofware to perform a single functioin well. It is impossible to get it to do everything for you.

Take visio and use it to create schematic drawings for your projects and it's great. Now take that same software and ask to do accounting and you're bending it's original purpose. While I am in no way knocking any software on the market. You must understand the all encompassing software will push a set of business rules on your business. There way of doing things becomes your way!

Let's break the problem into small parts and look for solutions at that level and not worry too much about one button does it all!

You can do schematics in visio
create estimation templates in excell
craete proposals in word
accounting in qbooks

and yup none of these applications talk to each other, but for a small company, less then 15 employees the upkeep of maintaining an overall system is larger then doing it in a distributed fashion.

I have examples of these docs if you want just email me and I'll send them along.

Todd

FRR
02-23-2005, 09:42 PM
TodBAdams is correct, for a small company it's hard to justify the initial cost of something like D-Tools as well as ongoing costs (a safe rule about new soft purchases is that 40% of a new application implementation cost is the purchase of the software and the remaining 60% is implemenation of said application)

As far as quote development software you may want to look at Quote Werks www.quotewerks.com or Bid Magic www.bidmagicav.com. Both companies have evaluation versions.

AHEM
02-23-2005, 10:25 PM
I highly recommend checking out the ongoing thread on this subject in the Business Decisions section of this forum.

Jerry
02-23-2005, 10:43 PM
I highly recommend checking out the ongoing thread on this subject in the Business Decisions section of this forum.
The thread was started by a guest. They don't have access to the Bus. Des. forum

MikeCAT
02-24-2005, 08:41 PM
Jtlaudio,

If you'de like access to the Verified section of IP, follow the instuctions on the homepage under "Got Verified" Once Gary has received your verification, you will have access.

The verified section is the only place on IP that it's cool to discuss pricing and other business issues. PM Gary or myself if you have any questions, and welcome to Integration Pros!!!


Mike

Anonymous
03-02-2005, 06:06 AM
Thank you guys for all the input. I think I am going to stick with what I'm using now. Which is Word and Excel. And save the money.

AHEM
03-02-2005, 07:55 AM
If you're looking for something that will do basic diagraming, there's a free program call AV Snap that's made by Altinex that's sort of a "poor man's Visio".

http://www.avsnap.com