Your spreadsheets got you here.
They will not get you to the next 20 jobs.

Spreadsheets are flexible, cheap and fully yours, which is why so many builders run on them for years. They start to cost more than they save when the same number lives in several places. A rate changes in the estimating template but not in last month’s quotes. A supplier invoice is keyed into Xero and then again into the job cost sheet. The only person who understands the formulas is the one who wrote them.

The usual trigger is growth: a second estimator, a project manager who needs live job costs, or more jobs than one person can reconcile by hand each month. If that sounds like your business, the move is worth planning. If you run a handful of jobs a year and the spreadsheets are under control, they may still be the right tool.

In VIABUILD the rate you price with, the budget line, the purchase order, the supplier invoice and the progress claim sit on one data model, so a number is entered once and flows through. Oryn reads supplier invoices and codes them to the job, so the double keying into Xero and the cost sheet stops, and job costs are live rather than rebuilt at month end. Roles keep an estimator out of the accounts and a site supervisor out of the margins, which a shared drive never could.

What it will not do is read your formulas. The logic in a spreadsheet does not come across; the data does. That is usually a relief, but it means the first estimate in VIABUILD is worth checking line by line against the spreadsheet you would have used. Coming from a construction system rather than spreadsheets? If that system is Buildxact, see switching from Buildxact to VIABUILD. Leaving a system such as Databuild rather than a workbook? Use the guide to moving off Databuild.