iTWO costX

We moved to CostX completely as a QS practice a number of years ago and we find it a very powerful tool in producing all levels of estimates, bills/schedules of quantities and builders quants etc. It's the best software we've seen for a number of years and for the future with it's BIM capabilities also.

With customised branded report formats available allow us to provide consistently high quality presentation documents.

Staff were quick to pick up the basics of operation and quickly progress their skills in taking off and scheduling digitally.

Regular updates from user feature requests and continually developing and improving the CostX software.

Excellent customer support and follow up to ensure the best service is provided and maintained to resolve any issues found or queried.

Lack of ability to complete cut and fill exercises
The only real downside is the inability to handle drawings in batches and without having to load them individually to edit their properties. We understand that this is a registered client feature request under review for development and greatly look forward to its implementation.

- Really easy to get started, just set out dimensions as you would manually, set out your spreadsheets and link the two up. The more you use it, the more you learn, and it just keeps getting better.
- No need to save all the time as all your work is up to date.
- Easily relates to excel spreadsheets.
- Data from spreadsheets can be exported or imported with ease.
- Importing of .dwg files directly from the drawing team makes measurements exact. Any mistakes in the drawing files can be picked up and relayed back to the drawing team before another revision.
- When working on multiple build projects, it is a lot easy to open and close jobs from the same place compared to other applications where they would all be seperate files needing to be opened.
- Being able to compare drawing files, ie; site plan over a subfloor plan to work out pile heights easily.
- The ability to do measurements, add a legend with quantities, save as a PDF and provide to subcontractors. ie; joist layout for builder, measure of a full drainage plan for the drainlayer.

The only thing that I have found hard work is the report software provided with Cost X. This is mainly because I just haven't had the time to put into it. I can see that it will be very good, but can see that this is going to take some time to get what I want from it. Other than that I still was able to make up functional reports easy enough, just not to the level I would like yet.

The software allows flexibility to suit the type of work we do. We are a specialist ventilation contractor and Cost X has taken us from manual drawing take off to a quick, simple and reliable system that you can review in seconds. We are organised and know a project inside out so we can negotiate contracts know that our figures and quantities can be relied on. We are also consistent in of pricing as quantities are accurate and rates are stable. The technical support team are amazing they provide a very prompt and professional service, they go to great lengths to get you back up and running as so as possible. Cost X is also value for money, I believe that it is worth one extra person in the office to me, the volume of work that can be done is excellent.

I do believe that training would really be essential for the correct use of the system, I did not get training but have still found it brilliant but I do believe if I was using it correctly I would probably get more from it. Also on the standalone version the back up button or procedure would need to be streamlined, as loosing data in Cost X is a huge lose to a company.