Choosing Construction Software as a Subcontractor: What To Actually Ask

The construction software market is built around general contractors, because general contractors have bigger budgets and more seats. A lot of what a subcontractor gets offered is a GC product with the hard parts turned off, priced per user, sold on the assumption that you have somebody whose job is to administer it. You do not.

Here is what to ask before you sign anything.

On pricing

• Is it per user, and does that include the field? Per-seat pricing that includes every crew member is the mechanism that makes a $200/month tool cost $1,400/month by the second season. Ask what happens when you hire six people in March.
• What is the implementation fee, honestly? Five-figure onboarding is normal at the top of this market and is often not on the pricing page.
• What is the contract term, and what happens at renewal? Annual lock-in with an auto-renew and a 60-day cancellation window is common.
• What does it cost to get my data out? Ask for the export format in writing before you put three years of history in.

On fit

• Show me a subcontractor account, not a GC account. If every demo screen is an RFI log and a submittal register, you are being shown somebody else's product.
• How does a change order get from the field to an invoice? Ask them to do it live. This is the workflow that costs subs the most money and it is the one most likely to fall apart in a real demo.
• What happens on a phone with one bar of signal? Not "is there a mobile app", but what happens when the app cannot reach the server mid-task. If the answer is a spinner, your crew will stop using it within a month.
• How does it handle two trades? If you run insulation and concrete, or service and new construction, you need reporting that can separate them and a system that does not make you pick one.

On the integration you actually need

For most subs there is exactly one integration that matters, and it is the accounting system. Ask specifically:

• Which direction does data flow, per record type, and can I turn each direction off?
• What happens when the same customer exists in both systems with slightly different names? "It creates a duplicate" is the wrong answer and it is the common one.
• Does an inbound change overwrite my data automatically, or do I get to review it first?
• What happens to my invoice numbering? If the tool assigns its own numbers and your accounting package assigns others, you have volunteered for a permanent reconciliation job.

On what happens after the sale

The two questions that predict a bad year: who does the setup, and who answers the phone in month four. A product that is excellent and unsupported is worse for a ten-person shop than a product that is adequate and answered, because you do not have anyone whose job is to work around it.

Run a real pilot, on real jobs

A sandbox with demo data proves nothing. Take three or four current jobs, ideally one that is going badly, and run them end to end in the new system alongside your existing process for a few weeks. It costs you some double entry and it answers every question a demo cannot.

At the end, the test is not whether people liked it. It is whether anybody would be annoyed if you turned it off.

A note on us

We build Opulence, so treat this section accordingly. We wrote this guide the way we did because we went through the same evaluation as a working insulation and concrete sub, and got quoted numbers that made no sense for a company our size. If our answers to the questions above are not the best ones you get, we would rather you bought the other thing than churned out in four months.

Written by the team at Opulence Built, who also run an insulation and concrete contracting business. We mention our own software where it is relevant and say so when we do.