BQE CORE is a business management solution built specifically for professional service firms. BQE CORE is a combination of a billing assistant, project management, and accounting solution. CORE is designed to do the hard work of delivering actionable insights directly to the user's dashboards or inbox. BQE CORE replaces the products Engineeroffice, Archioffice, and BillQuick; the functionality of these applications is now found in BQE CORE.
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Planview ProjectPlace
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Projectplace is a collaborative work management solution. The vendor says the product is built with teams of all sizes and complexity in mind, from virtual teams of five to entire global enterprises with tens of thousands of active users. It is also designed to incorporate waterfall and agile workflows.
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.
ProjectPlace has formats that ensure every project is handled in a friendly manner and that results attained are optimal. Besides, ProjectPlace has an excellent time locating system, where every action is well planned and resources channeled to meet the needs. Further, ProjectPlace has the conventional way of demand planning by learning the market.
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.
As a cloud based solution, Projectplace is one of the few true multiple location, multi person project management tools available for large teams. The reliability for large projects (with teams of anywhere between 50-200+ people) was a huge selling point for this and I witnessed this first hand.
The Windows and Mac applications for Projectplace are well designed and work impressively well for a project management tool. I found most of the teams had either application installed on their machine and did not have any complaints about it.
Features like AI and project management viewing styles like Kanban, Ganntt and others make the experience customizable for each user and made them adapt it to their preferred project management style.
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.
Under the time tracking, it would be nice to have a set template that would load each week and not have to click a button to load the previous week's template.
Somehow making it more intuitive.
Having to add in each service line and each detail that I cover for every service line each week is a bit ridiculous.
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.
We're committed now & have >50 users on Projectplace. All our projects are now tracked in the tool. We this investment of time & training, the cost of maintaining Projectplace is relatively low for the benefit. So we will renew, even if there are some idiosyncrasies in the tool & there are opportunities for improvement.
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.
Planview ProjectPlace is consistent in delivering the promised performance, which is a functional part that brings clarity. Further, Planview ProjectPlace increases the value of every transaction, where recording and documentation are well enhanced to bring a concrete way of business coordination. Finally, Planview ProjectPlace has an orderly way of bringing substantial communications.
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.
Planview ProjectPlace is quite complex, but it demands better engagement with various stakeholders to initiate a useful work environment. There are credible ways of establishing more live engagement, from direct chats and audio engagements. More so, Planview ProjectPlace is more formal, and this limits some users from outlining their demands or desires in matters of program performance.
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.
It offers a simpler alternative that's easier to manage by the less tech-savvy people. I also think that Planview Projectplace has managed to keep the product updated compared to other project management tools. Miro is perhaps the one that comes to mind, but while evaluating, we saw fewer issues with Planview Projectplace. Overall, the decision came down to the project manager, that had previous experience and recommended the product. For me, using a product from a smaller company is better because I know that there will be a focus on improving it, unlike, for example, Microsoft products that can be discontinued at any moment.
[We have the] ability to support remote work through projects that scale across multiple groups
We have large-scale quarterly projects, so the ability to save and duplicate project templates are helpful for us to keep track of tasks down to the specific card
