Excel vs ESTIMATION

Why use ESTIMATION instead of Excel?

For the management of user rights

Unlike Excel you can create user groups and allow or not allow :

• Modify a price, hourly rate from the catalogue

• Allow entering a project price

• Modify the output of a job for the catalogue

• Modify the composition of an assembly

• Overwrite a formula

Several people can modify elements of the templates at the same time

• In Excel, the second person who opens the database is read-only

Get statistics on projects

Usually, each project is in a separate Excel file. In software with a database manager,

you can easily make queries on all the projects and get the different information:

• What is the average price of an X assembly per square foot?

• What is the total amount we bid for in 2019?

• Estimator X accounted for how many of the bids were accepted by the customer?

Intelligent unit management

Unlike Excel, CBE allows the following operations:

• 12 feet X 12 inches = 12 square feet

• 100 feet of wall / 16 inches center to center = 75 pieces

Unlike Excel, CBE prohibits the following operations

• 2 feet + 2 square feet

Automatic backup

Sometimes Excel does not handle automatic saving well. In CBE each operation is saved after processing.

A more solid structure to manage the databases

In Excel, sometimes the file is corrupted or rows are shifted. It is not a real database manager. CBE is stored in a SQL database see Microsoft SQL Server. It is a relational database and so you can update, or not, the current quote if you change the list prices. see why-don't-use-excel-as-a-database