Accelo vs. BQE CORE vs. Scoro

Accelo is a system that can do it all. It's extremely sophisticated. Depending on the sophistication of your organization, or specifically the abilities of the people you put in charge of the implementation, it can almost be too sophisticated. It all just depends on your situation. The more you use it, the more data you give it, the more you'll be able to see and do. It's incredibly powerful. But it's definitely not a tool that would be appropriate for smaller boutique type organizations that have only basic needs.

Incentivized

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

Scoro would be ideal for a larger business who is truly interested in developing a stronger and more efficient workflow. I honestly would have recommended it had it not been for the cost, the hidden fees, and the fact that I'd have to upgrade to an even more expensive plan if I wanted to get the most of the program for our level. We only needed one item, so would have ended up paying much more to not use a great deal of additional features. So, if you want to increase your workflow and have the funds, use them - absolutely. You will not regret it. But I cannot recommend it to someone who is on a tight budget

Incentivized

• Timing Client Work: You are able to better manage your time on your clients.
• Housing Client Info in one Area: You can view all you need for any given client in one area.

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

• Great interface and user experience
• Fast, informative and compact platform
• Great invoicing and reminders system

Incentivized

• Accelo is excellent on the adaptation to its deep functionalities.
• Managing multiple project is very challenging.
• Not easy to collect multiple reports across platforms.

Incentivized

• 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

• Cost. I ended up not recommending this product simply because of the cost alone. There are hidden costs you will not know about until it is too late. Their pricing model is geared for bigger businesses, and can cripple smaller ones. The pricing is by user. If you get the most basic of plans (with a 900 onboarding charge), you will realize that all the things you actually need to make the program effective are on the next tier up...
• Quickbooks. At the time I was exploring this, Quickbooks was not very well integrated. If you wanted to include billing (which they do show promise for), then you will have issues here.

Incentivized

Looking forward to seeing more refinement of features provided and upcoming features promised :)

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.

From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)

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

Accelo doesn't really exceed any competitors in any one area of their product, but in 2015 when we made the move this was the best option that included all the tools we wanted. However, user adoption was low in some areas due to the UI, so we scaled back Accelo and added other tools.

Incentivized

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

We prefer Scoro as it's faster and easier to use and learn. Also the fee structure makes a lot of sense for a smaller company.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• It substantially reduced the number of systems we use to run our business.
• It reduced the need to train our staff on a variety of platforms.
• It gave us the ability to have a client-facing portal that directly integrates with our backend systems.

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

• Scoro could have had a wonderful impact on the workflow of the business. It allows for integrations most programs don't, including accounting and time tracking, and could have easily eliminated the need for an FTE through the streamlining of tasks alone.
• If we had implemented this program, we would have saved time, but all of the gains would have gone to pay for Scoro. It would not have balanced out, especially if they ever were to raise their rates.

Incentivized