Same customer, different scenario: This time, your sales professional and your customer service rep know everything there is to know about the customer and the health of the account. They know how much he’s bought over the years, how timely his payments are, and how seldom he raises issues. So they work together to satisfactorily resolve his concerns and boost his confidence in your company. And, as a result, he pays his bill and agrees to consider purchasing the new product.

Does the second scenario sound improbable? Not so. This is just one example of the power and effectiveness of SageCRM.

It takes more than great products to drive sales. Acquiring and retaining customers is essential for business success, and great customer service is the driving force that differentiates one business from another. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps businesses attract and retain customers and deliver an exceptional customer experience every time. With SageCRM, you can unlock the full revenue potential of your current customers and unearth sales opportunities with prospects.

SageCRM connects your sales, accounting, marketing, and customer service teams, and more. It delivers tight integration with leading Sage ERP solutions, breaking down departmental silos and providing a true 360º view of customers across front- and back-office functions. Highly flexible, SageCRM comes with fully customizable business process automation so you can tailor it to suit your business needs. SageCRM is available on-demand or on-premise for complete freedom of choice.

Click here to download the SageCRM brochure.

Well, now there is! TimberScan is a low cost, fast and easy way to automate your approvals and AP data entry. No manual method or other paperless system can streamline the approval process and increase your company’s efficiency the way TimberScan can.

And the reason for this is TimberScan was designed by a Sage Timberline Authorized Developer specifically for Timberline.

As Authorized developers we get a Timberline tool kit that allows us direct access to Timberline. Invoices coded and approved in TimberScan flow automatically to Timberline. There is never any duplicate data entry.

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Easy to use integration with Excel for Sage Timberline Office

Office Connector – Starter is a special version of Office Connector that is bundled with Sage Timberline Office (starting with version 9.7). Installed automatically with Sage Timberline Office, this special version is available for the ongoing use of all Sage Timberline Office users as part of their annual maintenance and support. The Starter edition delivers a set of six powerul Excel-based reports that you can use to query and interact with your business data. Users of Office Connector Starter can purchase upgrades to of the other Office Connector products (Query, Write, and Import) to gain additional functionality including: access to more prebuilt reports, the ability to modify reports, create new reports, and even send data from Excel into Sage Timberline Office.

Office Connector – Query lets you create and run Excel-based reports. View your Sage Timberline Office the way you want to see it! Take advantage of Excel’s graphing, formatting and flexible placement of workbook functions to visualize your information like never before.

Office Connector – Write lets you send your Excel data directly to Sage Timberline Office. The Wizard makes it easy to create, and the Approve Changes window puts you in total control of what gets written.

Office Connector – Import lets you send your Excel data to text files that are automatically formatted to be imported into Sage Timberline Office. Use this tool to create transaction and other records that can’t be created directly via Office Connector Write or the Timberline ODBC driver.

Sage Timberline Office offers estimators several ways to take off estimates in less time. With quick takeoff, you simply drag individual or groups of items from the cost database directly into the spreadsheet on the screen. Enter dimensions, and the software calculates all quantities for you. Or, if you prefer, you can use item takeoff to work with items prior to pulling them into the spreadsheet. For ultimate time-savings, Smart Assemblies or Model Takeoff is your tool, letting you take off all items in a wall, door, concrete slab or an entire building core and shell all at once. Takeoff Quantities, generated in can also be imported directly in to an Estimate. Again ensuring accuracy and saving time. A takeoff audit trail is also included in Estimating Extended, so you can double check your work at any time. Whether it’s during analysis or at the last minute, making adjustments to an estimate is a snap in Estimating. The software’s adjust columns feature lets you revise all, or a portion of, the quantities, amounts, and prices contained within a column at once. Calculate by a percentage, by multiplying or dividing and amount, by replacing an amount, or by spreading an amount proportionally over the selection.On bid day, when time is everything, adjustments can be easily made through Estimating totals page. Log in last-minute cuts and adds, and the software automatically generates the change throughout all the affected areas of the estimate. Or use the adjust job totals feature to match a pre-defined job total or cost per unit, or to play with the final numbers.

Data Integration
Once a job has been won the data used to generate the estimate transfers to Sage Timberline Office Job Costing, to produce the opening budgets for the job. This integration removes the need for the same data to be entered more than once and ensures accuracy.

Presentation Quality Reports
Timberline Estimating is supplied with many reports that can be customised to meet individual needs. Add colour, logos, headers and footers and also change fonts etc.

Price Updating
Prices updates received from your suppliers via electronic files can be applied to Item prices within the database to ensure that you are quoting with the latest prices available. Material prices for items such as Bricks can be updated in seconds when an overall ‘percentage by type’ increase occurs.

See it all from a new angle
With Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) codes, you can organize estimates a variety of ways by project phase, drawing detail or location, like Floor 1 or 2. Just define and assign your wn WBS codes to any estimate item, either in the database or during takeoff. With the ability to attach up to 40 WBS codes to each item, your analysis and reporting possibilities are endless.

Keep bids and quotes within reach
The software’s subcontractor bid grid offers a simple way to store, analyze, and select subcontractor bids and quotes by item. Log each subcontractor’s name, bid quantity, unit price, total bid amount, and any notes in the pop-up grid. Then just click on the bid you’d like to use, and the estimate instantly calculates the item based on your decision. What if you change your mind? Simply check a replacement bid, and the substitution is made instantly. Not only can you work with an estimate in any order you choose, you can change the order instantly using the sequencing tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Timberline Estimating forms an integral part of the Sage Timberline Office fully integrated suite of software, bringing 30 years of unrivalled experience to the Construction Industry.

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On-Screen Takeoff has been available for more than 6 years and comments from some long-term users may provide some assistance to people considering using the program in Australia.

Potential users of the software always ask, ‘How much time can I save by using OnScreen?’

Stuart Sullivan of the Perini Building Company has used the software for many years and his first comment is that; “In my experience, doing a take-off of a retail building using Stone Age implements (rulers & calculator) would take about 100 hours.  Using OST I can do it in 20 hours.”

Some parts of a take-off are a great deal quicker with OST.  For example, if you have already defined an Assembly in Ttimberline Estimating for concrete footings that includes excavation, , formwork, reinforcing and concrete supply etc; a take-off can be done in  about 30 minutes AND produce the units for the reinforcing and concrete orders.  A take-off the old fashioned way was tedious and would take 4 hours.

Steve Vairin from Firestop International makes a comment along the same lines and says that ‘a computer, (with OST), is extremely more efficient when calculating lengths and areas and I should add, more accurate’.

Writing an article that was produced in the Construction News family of magazines, Charles Herriot wrote that “On-Screen Takeoff is an impressive system which can reduce a typical quantity take-off from several day’s work to five or six hours”.

Charles goes on to say, ‘at the moment I work for developers and construction financing companies, basically telling them how much a project should cost and then certifying progress payments as construction proceeds.  I have to do take-offs in gruesome detail and then compare my estimation to the bids that come in from sub-trades.  I do three or four COMPLETE projects each week and there’s no way in hell I could do that with rulers and a calculator.’

In addition to the added efficiency many users report a huge improvement simply from not having to deal with large quantities of paper plans.  With the ability to read a wide variety of file formats OST means that offices are now able to work without expensive and cumbersome paper copies.

Stuart Sullivan says ’with a digitiser, I have no record unless I colour the areas or lines.  I then have to lug around drawings to meetings, on the plane, etc.  In fact, I am flying to an appointment in about 45 min. with approx. 1200 drawings in my computer.  Try to do that with paper and pencil’.

Other benefits that users have found include;

• Storing takeoffs, plans, specs on a computer file is obviously more efficient, and easier on the back.  At the end of the year, it’s a lot easier to box away dead jobs on cd-rom, than it is to physically throw away a years worth of plans, specifications etc.
• Hitting the page up/down button on the keyboard is a more efficient way of scanning pages, than full size plans.
• Marking up prints for the field is much easier using OST than doing them by hand, and you can print out as many colour coded copies as needed.

Finally, Charles Herriot goes on to say that ‘for estimators who have whiled away the hours, flipping pages looking for sectional drawings, On-Screen Takeoff has a feature that allows the drawings to be hot keyed so that with a simple click of the mouse, the user is taken from the main drawing page to the sectional drawing page.

Another exceptionally useful feature is the ability to import revised drawings and overlay them on the original drawings for an immediate determination of what has changed from revision to revision.  Both added and deleted sections are colour coded for quick identification of the changes.’

Check out our Podcast on Stressless Takeoff!

See a demo video of On-Screen Takeoff now!

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Sage Timberline Office, is an integrated family of financial and operations software. It presents a cross-functional system which consolidates information into a single-source control. Sage Timberline Office is built to address accounting and estimating needs. There are a variety of applications accommodating the process of building the estimate from concept to facility management. It even covers aspects such as deciding on the right time to sell. Sage Timberline Office integrates four elements of office management: Estimating, Purchasing, Project Controls and Accounting into one solution. The Estimating element offers CAD integration, common vendor/subcontractor lists, issues budgets to job costs, historical cost databases, conceptual estimates (modeling) and integration to purchasing. The purchasing segment creates a bill of materials from the estimation where you can then select from a common vendor/subcontractor list, issue subcontracts to job costs and issue purchase orders to job costs. The Project Controls aspect of the program manages contract and change orders, scheduling and subcontractors, including payments, insurance certificates, invoices, job cost variance reporting and warranty-tracking. The Accounting section offers efficient invoice processing, creates sworn statements, creates lien waivers, performs profit analyses by job and creates comprehensive financial statements.

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BuilderMT focuses exclusively on customizable residential construction software for large and medium-sized homebuilders. In the mid-1990s, BuilderMT developed Production Management; it was initially called ProHome and was powered by Timberline.  The Workflow Management Suite, abbreviated WMS and also referred to as Sage Timberline Office Production Management, includes applications to help builders control construction costs, pinpoint the reason for a variance, manage labor costs and handle contracts. Sales offices can also use WMS to communicate with purchasing and accounting. Finally, the suite includes modules for purchasing, pricing, construction scheduling (including wireless scheduling) and model management. Each module can also be purchased and used as a standalone product.

Software Workflow for Residential Builders

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Knowledge and Knowhow have supplied and supported Sage Timberline Office throughout Western Australia since 1989. During which time we have supplied software to building contractors, commercial and homebuilders. Some of the industries we supply include  construction, project management, oil & gas and mining. Our consultants are fully certified by Sage Software in various fields and keep up-to-date with the latest software developments, in order to maintain their Sage Timberline Office accreditation.

Sage Timberline Office has over 20,000 customers worldwide. They have been in business for over 30 years and have been supported in Australia since 1989. Sage Software Authorized Business Partners are located in each Australian State and throughout South East Asia and New Zeland.

World-class Support
We refuse to sit still, a promise that includes making sure our customers are getting the most of from their software by providing a full range of services they can depend on.

And if you have 20 minutes, have a look at the many YouTube videos listed below

Takeoff Tool |  Scales |  Worksheet Tab |  Zoom |  Plan Viewing |  Pan Window |  Pages |  Overlay |  Layout |  Layering |  Image |  Image Legend |  File Formats |  Digital Takeoff |  Cover sheet |  Communication |  Bid Tab |  Auto Fill and Backout |  Auto Count |  Audit Trail |  Annotation Tools

IMPORTANT: The version of the software supplied in Australia is a Metric, NOT Imperial System. At this time we do not have a Metric demonstration.

Some of the main On-Screen Takeoff features are:

• Suitable for anybody who generates quantities from a plan
• Takeoff lengths, areas, volumes, and perform counts from your computer screen
• Create Colour Coded Takeoffs, If it isn’t coloured it’s not counted
• Overlay revised plans to see changes
• Save hours of manual takeoff with scale rule and calculator
• Breakdown takeoff quantities by area
• Opens most image drawings as well as CAD formats

Integrate with Sage Timberline Office Estimating Software or Export to Excel

Click here to learn about what users have to say!

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