simPRO Reviews

Pros

Simpro is an excellent software for project management. it embeds features such as estimation, planning, execution of tasks, inventory management. it's really a complete and quite easy to use software.

Cons

I have to use it at least for 3 pojects to get my hands on it.

Alternatives Considered

MeasureSquare

Switched From

MeasureSquare

Pros

I like that we can track a job/project through the entire process starting with Lead Generation to creating an Estimate and then converting the estimate into a Job/Project all the way through to the final invoice. All stages of the project life cycle can be tracked and job-costing is a breeze because all job Purchase Orders, technician time sheets, etc. are visible.
The inventory management capabilities are a significant improvement over our previous methods. Having all of our vendor's products entered into the Catalog with visibility into our current on-hand inventory makes things more efficient during the estimating process and provides means of controlling how and when materials are assigned to jobs.

Cons

The user interface can be improved a little to make accessing information a bit more intuitive. It is not difficult by any measure, but I would like to see more flexibility and drag-and-drop capabilities - especially with the estimating portion.

Alternatives Considered

Tigerpaw Software, Corecon and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Reasons for Choosing simPRO

CW is designed more for Managed Network Service companies so although it did do a decent job with work orders and time entry, it was not effective at managing our materials inventory.

Reasons for Switching to simPRO

I liked the fact the the software was initially conceived and developed by someone that had experience as a contractor. Since many contractors share the same pain points related to tracking and controlling job costs, I felt that these would be addressed more effectively than a software developed for a generic audience or industry.

Pros

The software is relatively easy to use once you understand the workflow. Setting up the system for the first time was very easy. Customer support has been good. The quotes portion of this software is a breeze.

Cons

Over all this software to me has more pros than cons although some of the cons are very big in my line of work as a commercial HVAC Mechanical Contractor. The office, administration, scheduling , quoting and reports are very good though the tech work orders (ie job cards as SimPRO calls them) are probably the one of the largest pains we suffer with as a commercial HVAC Mechanical Service Company. The main problem is that Simpro will not allow you to create one Service Ticket to send to the customer that shows the techs write up of the worked performed, the techs on the job and the total hours. If two techs worked on a centrifugal chiller tear down for two weeks Simpro would generate a service write up with the same job number for each tech for each day. That’s two Simpro Service tickets a day for two weeks which totals 20 Service tickets that we have to send the customer just to show the total hours worked each day versus having one service ticket that the customer signs showing tech names and the total hours worked each day. We have talked to Simpro Support about this and there is nothing they can do or will do about this.
On the accounting and estimating side of this software Simpro uses Margin percentage (Simpro calls it Gross Margin) and not Gross Margin dollars. From what I understand Simpro originated in Australia and they use mark up percentage where as in America we use Gross Margin so beware.

Pros

Ease of use, functionality, easy to scale up and down with the software.

Cons

I hate the fact that I cannot remove the ability by security group to download whatever is on the screen. This is a huge data info/sec problem. For a business product I should have the ability to limit employee's ability to download a CSV file from any screen effectively handing out my pipeline, customer list, etc to whomever they want. There should be some control for this and this is almost to the point where the product is unusable because of security requirements we have from our own customers.

Pros

simPRO Enterprise is functional! And improving all the time. It's quick to load and easy to navigate. Now, this may be because we were one of the first to use it in Canada, but the level of customer service and attention to the users requests throughout our set up and subsequent upgrades has been amazing.

Cons

I would say, it has a learning curve - but if your implementation team are on the ball - you'll be ok!

Pros

There are some good features to this software, and on paper it works amazingly.

A few stand out features for me are:

- Inventory management
- Asset Management
- Would be great for large scale project management
- Integration

Cons

- Complications with the app syncing. The app will not automatically refresh itself so every-time there is a change you will need to have all your staff update their app
- Expense, be prepared for implementation to cost thousands of dollars.
- Overall SMUG (Im right you're wrong) attitude you will receive from many of their staff
- Their timesheet functionality is poor, they tell you you can use these start stop timers in the app and how good they are. When you use them it overlaps time in the time sheet rendering in inaccurate and unusable. Good luck getting the tech support team to spend time with you to figure it out. They will quickly find a way to blame you for the issue and move on.
- Many of the great features do not operate smoothly, you will need someone in your office to constantly monitor everything.

Alternatives Considered

Tradify and Fergus

Reasons for Choosing simPRO

Fergus is a small team with limited resources so their R&D is slow. Fergus is an amazing app with really friendly staff however Simpro sold me a dream and I took the bait. Simpro does have may features

Switched From

Fergus

Reasons for Switching to simPRO

Simpro has more features and more integration options

Pros

SimPro has helped our bottom line grow & grow & brings many departments into 1 platform!

Cons

Items like customer contacts & customer setup require multiple data entries. Quote forms needs higher level of editing to produce a pleasing, eye-catching aesthetic presentation form.

Pros

Customer support is always available when we need them and extremely easy to work with. SimPro software has extensive features to grow with our business. It is an all-in-one solution for us and eliminated the need for complex integrations.

Cons

Setup took some time and implementing required a lot of tweaks to the setup. But, with the amount of features we are utilizing it was to be expected. It also really helped to have a Simpro implementation specialist onsite during the process. Much better than trying to do it remotely like we have with previous software.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing simPRO

Did not track inventory and software was slow

Switched From

FieldEdge

Reasons for Switching to simPRO

Cost and pre-configured features

Pros

Bid creation. It is great to be able to pull a part from our catalog and then have a time associated to it and not need to calculate it.

Cons

There are some ease of use issue complaints I have gotten from our team. But once you get a hang of it, it is great. Just a bit of a learning curve from what they are used to.

Pros

The end-to-end solution of simPRO, from Lead to Invoicing, has helped to transform and streamline our business processes, going from an old server-based system to this new cloud-based system. Overall simPRO is a versatile field service management and service desk software that can also incorporate the management of larger projects.

Cons

Asset management and asset/job history could be more transparent. The system is very much geared towards assets that do not have multiple parts to them as it's difficult to see what parts have been replaced or haven't over time, plus you cannot see total asset spend of callouts.

Pros

I am able to customize and report on about pretty much everything I could possibly desire. We are all very happy with the way this system handles assets, we will be able to move our entire previous work history into these notes as it pertains to site location. We don't really care who owns the property. Our service life is about 10 years, it is very normal that owners change. This system organizes information perfectly to suite our needs.

Cons

We had a very unique QuickBooks system that had many quirks. I am a troubleshooter by heart and couldn't rest until we discovered a way to take the info kept in QuickBooks and bring it to simPRO. Ultimately, this was discovered to be double duty and not worth the effort. In the defense of simPRO - they did advise me that this was the case. I was very stubborn. Looking back on that experience it definitely went as well as it possibly could considering how much I was 'addicted' to that information. It did turn out that the route of not importing that work history, due to its complexity, was the right decision.

Pros

The software is pretty excellent when it comes to creating, managing and invoicing jobs with day to day clients. Most aspects of the desktop software are quite easy to use and understand. The original setup is quite a task but once you have the system running it works well. It would be hard to loose a job like a papertrail could be lost.

Cons

The mobile platform is rubbish. Constant crashing and syncing errors. From a technician and management perspective the platform either doesnt record any of your information for the day because it failed to sync or it crashes and wont log you in on the day. Constantly resetting the apps database to login and sync my phone. Paper would be faster and more efficient some days.

The worst part about this is the application on android has not had an update since april 2019. (18 Months) It also has an average rating of 1.6 stars with 368 approximate reviews. The company obviously cares very little about its field component.

Pros

Relatively easy to use. The jobbing features in general are easy. Interest on overdue invoices should be better set up and integrate with Xero better. Currently is manual and very time consuming. PO's should have better restrictions but are easy to use. Great help menu and find it very easy to follow when I need help. When there are Simpro Enterprise or Connect problems would like immediate notification as this affects job syncing and slows our process down.

Cons

Integration was easy but we had help from our Laser Group business development manager

Pros

Excellent at keeping track of costs on projects

Cons

Quote forms (templates) are a bit 'clunky'

Pros

It works for very basic things, and if you are a very basic user or currently incredibly disorganised it might be able to help you.

Cons

It is very clunky. The basics do not work well, and they keep adding functionality that seem unneeded and frankly odd. It will leave you disappointed at the core inflexibility.

Even with a huge amount of feedback to this effect, meaningful improvements are never made.

Get used to using workarounds.

Pros

Layout is easy to use. Able to customize invoices, etc. Tracks inventory.

Cons

Purchased the software and then almost immediately needed to upgrade to get the features we'd like.

Alternatives Considered

Tigerpaw Software

Pros

The quoting element is good but needs to be more customizable as our customers often change their minds. It would also be great if all the quotes in our existing software could have been imported but this isn't something that Simpro do. The mobile app is great as it allows me to keep a track of the team, allows the team to add pictures to the job and they can compete pre start audits.

Cons

It's HUGE and takes quite a while to get used to. It's also not the most intuitive software I've ever used. The help desk team is brilliant though.

Pros

If there is one thing, to say, I like most about SimPro, it would have to be the ability to quote, create a scheduled job, and invoice that Job all in a matter of minutes compared to hand typing everything over and over again, or losing track of time. It's just simple.

Cons

There are minor things about SimPro that could use work, but overall there is nothing I can say I like least about the software.

Pros

The customer support is amazing. I learned the program form them guiding me through everything

Cons

Not the easiest program to learn it also is missing some features the would come in handy.

Pros

simPro is start to finish. Sales/project jobs and service jobs/technician types in notes remotely, clocks and and out, straight to billing and managing an A/R.

Cons

Some of the reports are not well explained or thought out.

Pros

I really love and like the way that you can use the functions and the tools to manage your business in a great way, I like that the graphic interface it's professional and the way that you can order your business, it's absolutely good

Cons

I don't like that some functions and tools don't have the best use, or are obsolete, because there are some functions that comply with the the use of other function.

Pros

Job management and the system is relatively intuitive and easy to learn

Cons

System strong on job costing & management - could be improved to further support high volume recurring job service businesses

Pros

Our process have been so streamlined since we started using Simpro. It makes having checks and balances so much easier and communicating with our customers.

Cons

You have to be on top of making sure every single setting is correctly set and we have had issues organizing the contacts.

Pros

I really like the way the software is laid out. Pretty easy to navigate.

Cons

Sometimes can be a little sluggish. We have been kicked offline a couple of times.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Pros

Great user interface, satisfying number of templates for project management processes

Cons

It still requires additional templates and improved precise drawing tools.