ConEst IntelliBid

I have been using and testing electrical estimating software since about 1982. In October of 2000, I had a demonstration of Intellibid, and in less than five minutes I was sold. The first three features they demonstrated were enough for me to make up my mind. The main interface is the audit trail, which is very visual and interactive, almost like a spreadsheet, allowing the user to edit, cut, paste and delete takeoff items. The programs allows the user to add or insert comments in the audit trail. This is great for those "Why did I do that?" question you have several months later when you start construction on the project. The third feature is the Libraries, where all the material items and assemblies are accessed. The program comes with a complete and useful set of Libraries, but if you want to change them, you can. For instance I estimate a lot of waste water plants, so all of my risers from underground have to be PVC Coated RGS. It took me less than five minutes to add the PVC Coated RGS to the PVC Library, which saved me many keystrokes since I did not have to switch bake and forth between the Libraries. Of course, I have discovered a hundred other great features since then. Almost every time I called tech support to ask if the program could do something, the answer was yes.

The is almost nothing negative I can say about the program. As with all complex software, every once and a while a little glitch can happen, which tech support usually corrects in minutes. When they can not correct it immediately, they come up with a work around. The biggest problem I ever had was the program locked up once. Tech support had me up and running in ten minutes.

The pricing model for this program is great. The full featured, or Pro version is over $5,000. However, the light version is just a little over $2,000, and includes all of the main features. The have only removed some advanced and often unneeded features, such as the ability run it on a network. The also allow you to buy single features, instead of forcing you all the up to the Pro version.