BUILDSOFT HOME BUILDING SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
In 2004 Constellation Software Inc acquired NEWSTAR, a company dedicated to providing software solutions for the homebuilding industry. The firm then acquired the BuildSoft and Builder 360 product lines and incorporated them into NEWSTAR.
Today NEWSTAR is now known as Constellation Homebuilder System and offers six construction software tools. Four are tailored to specifically to residential construction firms -- FAST, NEWSTAR, Builder 360 and BuildSoft -- and Constellation CRM offers sales and customer relationship management tools. More than 1,300 construction firms, including more than 30% of North America's top 200 builders, use one of these five home building software lines, according to the firm.
BuildSoft home building software was designed to meet the various accounting, estimating, project management and job costing needs of small or medium-sized residential builders and remodelers. According to Constellation, BuildSoft's stated business goal is to allow small and medium-sized construction firms to focus on building homes -- not on the time-consuming back-office tasks associated with running a company.
Construction cost estimating features of BuildSoft include the ability to create preliminary budgets, monitor subcontractor and vendor bids, and produce purchase orders and work orders from take-offs done with a digitizer or pre-loaded data.
Once that is done, BuildSoft's job cost accounting software allows clients to monitor budgets through functions such as general ledger, accounts payable, purchase orders/work orders, accounts receivable and payroll.
Finally, this home building software's project management tool controls construction scheduling by automatically updating a construction calendar with daily reminders, and in case of a schedule change, updating all dependents tasks. This function uses Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling, Gantt charts and database of templates, according to the vendor.
