Sage Estimating

What do you like best?

Sage can allow you to document quantities in all different organizational formats from being the project/area type (new, remodel, etc.) to uniformat or masterformat division organization. It has it's own database that can be helpful at times and includes a lot of items that can be documented accurately for each project.

What do you dislike?

Sage does not have a system for actually doing the quantity takeoffs, so my company uses other PDF readers to count the items, then transfers the information into Sage. If you can imagine, this is a long process and can be fixed by incorporating a system like OST or Bluebeam into the program. It also doesn't look visually appealing, compared to other programs it is lacking a few years.

The program visually doesn't have much variation for tracking quantities. Everything is simply black and white with some teal highlighting. This can be changed but it is a hassle that Sage should work on.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It definitely get's the job done, but you have to be willing to have multiple programs in addition open to help you get that success. It takes time to get used to the program and its quirks, but once you have it, it is very effective.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

As noted above, since we cannot use Sage as a quantity take-off program, we have to incorporate other programs which after a while of getting used to, works pretty efficiently. The benefits of Sage is the knowledge and database of prices of all kinds of items in the construction industry. It is very lenient with units of measurement that you're using.