Must have for contractors, renovators, disaster restoration specialists

If you use an iPad or any recent Mac product (incl iPhone) this is quite good.

Pros: 1/ Provides professional results based on the ‘Craftsman Books’ databases. 2/ Users can also generate their own ‘cost books’ tailored to their unique situation. 3/ All purchased and custom cost books can be accessed and integrated together in compiling estimates. 4/ Reports can be generated in several useful formats — all professional-looking — with options for breakdowns, markups, taxes, contract integration, etc. 5/ A real time-saver and professional image enhancer all in one. 6/Great product support from the developer.

Cons: 1/ Craftsman database cost descriptions can be overly long resulting in truncated descriptions in reports (really that’s a Craftsman Books issue, not CCE — note: these can be edited manually if necessary); 2/ an option to ‘globally modify’ custom cost book entries so that changes apply to previous entries is currently unavailable (at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it); 3/ there is no ‘save as’ option for backing up current projects, (though the ‘duplicate’ option seems to serve the same purpose — but without an option of saving the data files to a different location — I have backup paranoia, what can I say);

Note: if disaster restoration and especially bio-remediation (ie mold, bacteria, etc) is important, then you need BOTH the NRI and the NHI modules. (For some reason, known only to Craftsman, the Home Improvement module includes a much more extensive database of costs for these sorts of projects than does the Restoration/Insurance module.)

CanAm Services about Construction Cost Estimator