Save it once: how construction teams are syncing Procore and Dropbox

Most construction businesses we talk to that run Procore alongside Dropbox don’t have a systems problem. They have a gap problem.

Procore runs the projects. It’s where the documents that govern the job live — drawings, contracts, the current revision of everything. Dropbox runs the business. It’s where the wider organisation actually works day to day, and where a lot of people are far more comfortable. Both platforms do their job well. The trouble sits in the space between them, where somebody has to take a file out of one and put it into the other, and then remember to do it again the next time it changes.

That’s what our recent webinar covered: the SyncEzy integration that closes the gap, presented by Mark Bubner from our implementation team. This is the written version — useful if you’d rather read than watch, or if you want something to send to whoever manages your documents.

▶ Watch the full webinar on demand (includes a walkthrough of the integration portal)

The problems we hear most

Four things come up almost every time we talk to a business running both systems.

1. Documents don’t make it into Procore. Someone finishes a file and means to upload it. It doesn’t happen, and the gap isn’t discovered until the document is needed.

2. Field and office staff are working from different versions. An update is made on one side and never reflected on the other. By the time someone’s out on site working from it, the file in their hand isn’t the current one.

3. There’s no redundancy on Procore attachments. For businesses with ISO obligations, or anyone who has thought seriously about business continuity, a single copy of your project record in a single platform is a risk that doesn’t need to exist.

4. Downloading, editing, and re-uploading is somebody’s actual job. Not a formal one — but the minutes add up, and they come out of the day of someone you hired to do something else.

None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they’re the reason this integration exists.

The three things that sync

The integration is deliberately straightforward, and it moves three kinds of content.

Project documents. The Documents tool inside a Procore project pairs to a folder in Dropbox, two ways. Your folder structure is copied across — the same folders, the same nesting — so nothing has to be reorganised to make it work. Change a file on either side and the change appears on the other.

Worth understanding: the Documents tool is per project. Twenty projects means twenty document folders in Procore and twenty matching folders in Dropbox. That’s a feature rather than an inconvenience — each project’s material stays scoped to that project.

Company documents. This is the one people don’t expect, and it’s often the more useful of the two. Alongside the per-project folders, Procore has a centralised company documents area — the standards, templates and reference material that apply across the business rather than to one job. That pairs to its own Dropbox folder. Maintain the master set in whichever system suits your team, and it’s current in both.

Photos. The Procore Photos tool syncs the same way. If your site teams are capturing progress photos and your office needs them without asking anyone, this is the flow that handles it.

How fast it actually is

This was the one question asked live on the day, and it’s the one we get most often.

The integration checks every minute. We’re continuously asking both platforms what has changed, and when something has, it goes into a queue and is processed. In practice, most single document changes are processed within a couple of minutes.

Volume is the exception. If you take a folder full of documents that was sitting outside the sync and move it into the synced structure, we detect the new folder and its entire contents, recreate the folder on the other side, and bring everything across. Depending on how much is in there, that can take ten or fifteen minutes. Steady-state changes are quick; bulk moves queue and work through in order.

What the setup looks like

You register for free at integrations.syncezy.com, which creates your account and shows you the full integration catalogue. Once you’re using an integration, it appears under My Integrations with its own app on your portal dashboard.

Connecting a project takes a couple of minutes. In the configuration screen, you choose the company, choose the project, choose which tools to sync — documents, photos, or both — and pair it to a Dropbox folder. One practical note that catches people out: the Dropbox folder needs to exist before you can link to it, so create your destination first.

After that, the File Manager view shows you sync status folder by folder. Ticks mean everything in that folder is synced. An X means a document is currently in flight and processing.

The important part is what happens next, which is nothing. Once it’s configured, it runs. Your project teams keep working in Procore, everyone else keeps working in Dropbox, and nobody has to think about the integration again.

Security and support

Moving data between two platforms that both take security seriously means we have to meet the same bar. SyncEzy is SOC 2 Type II certified, and CASA-approved through the ADI protocol, and we’re continuously working on both maintaining those and adding to them.

Support runs 24/5 — from the start of business Monday in New Zealand through to close of business Friday in the United States. Wherever you are, a working day is covered. Setup comes with a hands-on onboarding process, because the point is that the integration delivers what you need from day one rather than eventually.

What about the other Procore tools?

Documents and photos are what’s live today, and for a lot of businesses that’s the whole requirement.

We’re continuously looking at extending the integration, though, and for some of the other Procore tools — incidents and commitments came up on the day — we have the ability to bring items across as PDF documents or read-only views in Dropbox. That works as a backup and a visibility layer for the parts of Procore that aren’t documents.

It isn’t a switch we flip on request. It’s a business-case conversation: tell us which tool your workflow actually depends on and how you’d use it, and we’ll assess it properly.

The point of all of it

Hari Iyer, our co-founder, put it plainly at the end of the session: the goal is to make it easy for people to get at project documentation in whatever system they want to work out of. Some of your people live in Procore. Some live in Dropbox. Neither group should have to leave the tool they know, or wait on someone else, to see the current version of a file.

Or, as Kieran Lewis at JDL Constructions summarised it after going live: “The biggest win was only needing to save the items once.”

Watch the recording

The full session runs about 20 minutes and includes the portal walkthrough, the Procore and Dropbox folder structures side by side, and the live Q&A.

▶ Watch the webinar on demand

If you’d rather talk it through for your own setup, book a short call with our team.