Your work
Every other system in this trade loses your work.
Not as an accusation. As a list of documented failures, six of them below, admitted by the vendors themselves or published by their own customers. This page says what Estimark does instead, in enough detail that you can go and test it, and it is equally specific about what it does not cover yet.
Six things that go wrong on site
What actually happens, mechanism first. If any of these turns out to be wrong in the product, it is a bug in the product rather than a stretch on this page.
You walk into a tunnel
Nothing in the app is sent from a button. Every change is written to the phone first and queued, so a photo taken in a plant room with no signal is already saved before there is anything to send it to. The queue retries on its own the moment the phone sees a network again, backing off between attempts up to five minutes. A change the server refuses outright is kept and shown to you rather than dropped.
You force-quit the app
The queue is on disk, not in memory. Killing the app, restarting the phone or signing out leaves every waiting change where it was, and it sends when you sign back in. Signing out does not clear it. On the web the same queue lives in the browser database and survives closing the tab.
You delete the wrong photo
Deleting a photo, a snag, a snag's photos and video, a site diary entry or a document moves it to a bin for 30 days instead of destroying it. The file itself is left alone until the window passes, so restoring gives you the picture back and not just its name. The bin is a screen you can open, on the phone and in the browser, and it says who deleted each thing and when.
You change your mind
Approving, rejecting, editing and deleting all hold for a few seconds in the queue before they go. In that window Undo removes the queued request, so nothing was ever sent anywhere. Once it has gone the app says so in those words rather than pretending to take it back.
Two people edit the same day
A site diary entry saved by two supervisors merges field by field. One writes up the weather, the other the delays, and both keep their work, because a save only writes the fields nobody else has changed since you opened the form. Where you have both changed the same field, the one that arrived first stays and yours is kept rather than thrown away.
You want to know where things stand
A strip at the top of every screen says how many changes are waiting, when the app last checked, and how many failed. Tapping it lists the failures with the reason each one gave. A queue you can see is a queue you can trust; an app that says nothing until something is missing is how people learn to take photographs of their own screens.
Why this page exists
What happens elsewhere
Each of these is on the record. Two are in the vendor’s own documentation and four are from reviewers describing what happened to them. They are named so you can check, and because a vague claim about unnamed competitors is worth nothing.
PlanGrid, now Autodesk Build
Their own support documentation states that logging out or uninstalling with items still waiting to sync clears the sync log, and that those markups are lost permanently.
Bluebeam
A community thread titled "Lost mark-ups". Recovery depends on a setting having been switched on before the crash, so the people who need it are the ones who did not know to look for it.
Buildertrend
No undo on schedules, and no bulk export to fall back on when something goes wrong.
Dashpivot
Concurrent editing of one template means, in a reviewer’s words, that one erases the other. The same reviewer lost a set of commissioning data that way.
Raken
A reviewer warning that there is not a backup guarantee if something with the system crashes.
Simpro
Reviewers reporting work being lost regularly, and one describing having had to enter the same notes three times.
Limits
What this does not cover
A page like this is only useful if it is honest about its own edges, so here are ours, at the same size as everything above.
The bin covers five kinds of record, not everything
Photos, snags, snag media, site diary entries and documents. Quotes, invoices and jobs are not in the bin. They are protected differently: Estimark refuses a delete that would take evidence with it, and tells you what is in the way.
Field-level merging is on site diary entries so far
Every other record still takes the last save that arrives. On the phone you are told when your edit overtook somebody else’s, so you can go and look, but the merge itself is not yet applied to those records.
Undo is on the phone, not in the browser
The take-it-back window exists because the phone queues everything before sending. The browser sends straight to the server when it has a signal and only queues when the request fails, so there is no window to offer and none is offered.
Deleted does not mean hidden from a legal request
A record in the bin is still your data. If you ask us to erase a person’s data, the erasure reaches the bin as well, so deleting something first is not a way to keep it. After 30 days a daily job removes the row and the file for good.
How to test it
Take a trial, put a phone in aeroplane mode, and photograph something. Then force-quit the app, reopen it, and watch the strip at the top count down as it sends. Delete the photo, open the bin, and put it back. It takes about two minutes and it is the only kind of evidence that counts here.
Common questions
- What happens if I lose signal halfway through a site visit?
- Everything you do carries on working. Changes are written to the phone and queued, and the queue sends itself when signal comes back. A strip at the top of the screen tells you how many changes are waiting, so you are never guessing.
- If I sign out with changes still waiting, do I lose them?
- No. The queue is stored on the device, and signing out clears your login rather than your work. The changes send when you sign in again, and they stay yours in the meantime. Site phones get handed round, so the queue records who made each change and will not send it under the next person to sign in, or into their company. This is called out because the opposite is documented behaviour in at least one competing product.
- Can I get back a photo I deleted by mistake?
- Yes, for 30 days. Deleting moves it to a bin rather than destroying it, and the image file is kept until the window passes. Open the bin from the phone or the browser and press restore. The bin also records who deleted it and when.
- What happens if two of us edit the same site diary entry?
- Both edits are kept. A save writes only the fields nobody else has changed since you opened the form, so two people filling in different parts of the same day both keep their work. If you have both changed the same field, the earlier value stays in the record and yours is held, with both shown side by side so somebody can choose.
- Is there an undo?
- On the phone, yes. Approving, rejecting, editing and deleting are held in the queue for a few seconds first, and Undo removes the queued request before it is sent. If it has already gone the app tells you it is too late rather than claiming to have reversed it.
- How do I know something actually saved?
- The status strip is on every screen and does not hide when things are fine. It shows the number of changes waiting, when the app last checked, and how many failed, with the reason each failure gave.
How your data is handled, and by whom, is set out in the privacy policy. What each plan includes is on pricing.
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