Document management isn’t what gets anyone excited about estimating, but it’s a crucial part of the job. Statistics on time spent searching for documents range from 5 to 9 hours a week, all of which is time wasted not completing actual work.
Take control of your time with STACK’s robust document management functionality.
Access What You Need
Being able to access the documents you need for projects may seem barely worth mentioning within the field of estimating, but it’s still a big problem in the construction industry. Plans and specs come in via email, are downloaded from ITB platforms, or can be pulled from other sources, all by multiple team members, and soon nothing is where it needs to be. STACK solves this problem – both during the work but also pre–bid, by helping you quickly decide if a project is worth estimating or not. Get to the projects you care about and can make money on as fast as possible.
Integrations with Other Tools
By seamlessly integrating with a variety of other platforms, including your own local drives, STACK makes accessing what you need quick and painless. Wherever you or your team get your documents, adding them to STACK is easy.
- Procore
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- OneDrive
- Box
- Best-in-class construction plan rooms like Dodge and Pantera
- Construction CRMs like Top Builder and FollowupCRM
- Construction news services
- Project management tools
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Get your FREE account today to:
- Increase Team Efficiency
- Complete Estimates Faster
- Generate More Revenue
A Single Source of Truth
With one place to keep your documents, your team knows right away where to put items and where to find them. There’s no more concern about misplaced documents left on someone’s individual desktop or working from email attachments, never knowing if you have the most recent version of the document.
Working in Real-Time with the Cloud
STACK is a cloud-based platform, which means anyone on your team can access your documents from anywhere, anytime. Team members can make and view changes in real-time, allowing for exponentially more collaboration and time savings. Remote employees or those working together from different offices can collaborate on the same documents and plan sets without leaving their location or waiting their turn.
Store & Organize
With so many pieces of information to keep track of for each project, it’s critical not only to be able to access your documentation but also to find it when you need it, and know it’s current.
Folder Structures for Your Team
With STACK’s platform, you can create a folder structure that makes sense for your individual team. You’re not tied to an existing organization structure. For each project, you might create a main folder, with subfolders for plans pertaining to each relevant trade, any addenda, as well as subfolders for supporting documents like contracts and material lists. Keeping the structure the same for each project means your team can find anything they need at a glance.
Current Documentation
Because STACK is cloud-based and users can access documents in real-time, you can always be sure that you’re working from the most up-to-date plans and documents. Users can work in the cloud without needing to download and reupload documents, so any changes are automatically saved and available for the rest of the team. No more working from outdated documents and wasting time.
Finding What You Need Within Your Documents
Accessing your documents is just one piece of the puzzle. If you’re spending hours flipping through plans sets to find the pages that apply to you, you’re still at a huge disadvantage. STACK’s functionality has a solution for that as well.
Search
Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities are advanced, which means our software is able to read your PDF plans and specs so that you can search for the terms you need even amidst thousands of plan pages and go right to your trade or specialty. No more skimming each page hoping you’ll spot what you need. You can go straight to pages that matter most, ignore the rest, and get right to work.
STACK Pro Tip!
Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is the process of converting an image of text into machine-readable (and searchable) format.
Hyperlinking
STACK automatically hyperlinks callouts within plan pages, so you can go directly to the referenced page without wasting time and get the info you need.
Autonaming
Our powerful software preprocesses all incoming documents to automatically name files based on plan page numbers so file names are consistent, clear, and easily identifiable.
Make Your Documents Work for You
Now that you’ve got STACK to help you find and organize information, you can dig even deeper with tools to help you better do your job.
Visual Display Options
See what you need the way you need to with large thumbnail displays for searched and filtered documents, plus use multiple document rotation, deletion capability, full screen views, and a print function.
Plan Overlay
When change orders and revisions come in, use STACK to easily identify what’s different on your plans. You can then transfer your original takeoff to the current version of the plans so that all measurements are in the same place and you don’t have to duplicate any processes.
Stay Ahead of the Game with STACK
Document management is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to STACK’s preconstruction capabilities.
