AbacusLaw by CARET vs. BQE CORE

My understanding is AbacusLaw was bought out by CARET and now pushing their cloud based CMS. Support has always sucked with AbacusLaw. Again, our latest 10+ issues has been going on since 2/13/2023 and it is now 5/18/2023. Abacus STILL does not know how to fix our issues!!! For $60/month per user, you think they would have better support. I have in the process of canceling our contract for breach of contract due to support and the issues for the last 3 months and going with a new CMS. However, the partners of the firm want to stick with a self-hosted (stand alone) CMS, and they are few and far between anymore.

BQE CORE is well suited for a firm trying to get a better understanding of their project performance as a whole as well as better manage time and project resources. It is not the greatest for client management through a project or through invoicing, but it is do-able within the system.

Incentivized

• Security
• Organization
• Easy to use

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• SUPPORT STINKS - As of today we have been having issues for OVER 3 MONTHS, but Abacus now only has ONE Tier II tech, and ONE Tier III tech and neither one have figured out our problem or fixed it!
• Having a lot of issues since day one
• We have a self-hosted version and are not on the cloud and the updates usually bring other issues. They don't know the term "if its not broke don't fix it."

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

The support is generally good and relatively quick BUT when there is a new product or something they want you to buy, I have felt a bit harassed at that point by sales but when I have an issue I don't feel like support jumps on it as quick.

Incentivized

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

I did not evaluate MyCase when we selected AbacusLaw. I did not select AbacusLaw and was not involved at that time in the decision. I am evaluating MyCase NOW to REPLACE AbacusLaw.

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• We have been using Abacus (and previously Amicus) for so long it is hard to tell.

Incentivized

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation