Last week I used Goldenseal to make a construction estimate for a grand old house in Binghamton NY. It had solid brick walls, R value about 2. To avoid huge heat bills, it needed foam insulation, lots of trim futzing, and moving or replacing radiators. Plus other white elephant repairs.
That was the first time I used our estimating software since the beginning of the pandemic. Sadly, real estate is still hot around here and I was outbid. It won’t be the new home for TurtleSoft.
Looking up current material prices for the work was a revelation.
The bad news is, many Cost Items in Goldenseal are badly outdated. Joint compound now is 4.5 gallons not 5, so Assemblies need an adjustment. Drywall has more options. Some product names are defunct. All material prices are way off.
The good news is, it’s so much easier to update material prices these days. All it takes is a quick search on the Home Depot or Lowes websites.
Goldenseal was built for the pre-website world. Back then you printed a list, begged a local lumber yard to fill it in, then typed in new pricing. By the mid-90s, a few local suppliers offered text files with current prices, so we added a system to match our Cost Items to their codes. It was only slightly easier.
We just added new URL text fields to Cost Item records. It’s step one for automatic price updates via the Internet.
To make it work, we need to write C++ code to parse their html and fetch the price amount. The process will be different for each website. It’s a feature that we’ll add at some future date, after the new app is released and mature.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
