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Ok, so you have decided that it might be a good idea to invest in electrical estimating software. You get the sales person round, he gives you a slick demo, price seems reasonable, hey your away! Or are you?
It never ceases to amaze me all the extras these niche market vendors charge for. What surprises me even more is willingness of contractors to accept the extra charges that come after the purchase.
First up, training. It's software, actually it's niche market software developed specifically for the market and therefore should be intuitive in use. Users don't generally go on training courses for software they purchase, so why would you need a training course for software that these companies say have been written "specifically" for electrical contractors - often quoting "many years of experience writing software for electrical contractors". If they have that much experience why did they not write software that was easy to use, or produce a set of videos that cover the training sessions and give them freely to there customers instead of charging hundreds of pounds for each training session? In fact there is company in the industry that does this.
Next up, technical support. You bought this estimating software because the sales person said it was good. Lets be honest, the sales person probably said it was actually the best! Now he is asking you for a few hundred more, each and every year that you want to use the software, just in case you have a problem. Hold on, you bought the software because you expect to be costing contracts not contacting the provider for support every five minutes. You were told the software was stable and easy to use, why do you now need to "pay" for technical support? If the software vendor cares about its customers why are they trying to charge you for something you should not need and is probably not your fault? If you look around there is at least one company in the UK that provides estimating software to electrical contractors and stand behind the software with free support.
Most software companies will bandy phases like "customer care". Lets be honest the only thing most of them seem to care about is their balance sheet. If they cared about there customers support would be free and the applications would not need class room style intensive training in order to use them.
There is electrical estimating software available that comes without these excessive charges. One such system has an electrical database of around 250,000 products, which has an option for price updates at quite reasonable charges - if you need price updates. A full course of tutorial videos are provided free to eliminate the training cost and technical support is provide free of charge. The estimating software can be purchased via the web with a 30 day no quibble returns guarantee - which means you keep it only if it lives up to "your" expectations. (There are many estimating software programs sitting on shelves in contractors office, where users bought the software off the back of a smooth sales demo only to find it was not as smooth when they needed to use it.) There is a moral in there somewhere.
