BQE CORE vs. Kanbanery (discontinued)

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

I use Kanbanery for web app projects, customer support, and for my personal tasks. I think it would be perfect for DevOps, too. It might get a little tricky if there were hundreds of developers on one project, but with just ten to twenty people per team it's perfect.

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

• I really like how easy it is for my clients to use Kanbanery. That's the most important thing for me in a project management tool, because I don't want the tool to get in the way of working with clients.
• I can see really quickly what needs to be done, and more importantly, what doesn't need to be done. Having a clear view of all my tasks takes a lot of stress of off me.
• Kanbanery is also good for communication with clients. If I have a task card that represents a component, we can talk about it in comments, or we use the project chat for general stuff. It keeps my email from getting cluttered.

• 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

• I'd love to see some improvements in the Scrum burn down chart, but it works okay as it is.
• It would be nice if we could adjust the width of the columns. It's fine on most monitors, but on a small screen I have to scroll sideways.

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.

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

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

Kanbanery is the easiest to use with the best visibility. It doesn't have a lot of features I don't need, like Basecamp or LeanKit, but it's much more robust than Trello or Pivotal Tracker. It's just the perfect balance of ease of use and collaboration tools for me. I also like the UI better than the others. It's sleek without a lot of bright colors and rounded corners that make some tools look plastic and unprofessional.

This software works on a small and large scale.

• 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

• I feel like we're much more efficient. I spend more time working on tasks now and a lot less time digging through tickets.
• Since we can see when there's a problem in our team really easy with Kanbanery, people get help when they need it sooner. That has to be good for productivity.

Incentivized