BQE CORE vs. Deltek TrafficLIVE

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

Traffic is suitable for most agencies, regardless of size. You don't need to use all of the features in order to get good results. And it can be linked to Maconomy which is useful for larger agencies. We have around 80 employees and it works great.

• 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

• The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
• It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
• It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
• Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.

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

• I would like to be able to colour code my clients, so I can see at a snapshot what projects staff are working on.
• I would like to be able to colour code staff holidays, public holidays so I can easily see what resources I have available.
• As an administrator, I can't see at a glance the actual time spent on a task work or comments a user has logged.

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

Deltek TrafficLIVE was the pre-existing system when I joined the company. When we decided to purchase a new system, we considered a number of options such as Kimble PSA, Oracle NetSuite & Mavenlink. We decided to go ahead with Kimble PSA because we felt that as a package, it provided all the functionality we need against its competitors. It had far more functionality than TrafficLIVE and was more suited to the scale of our business.

Incentivized

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

• Much more clarity as to how much time each different type of brief should take to complete as we can back reference as to how long it took last season.
• It has lead to better customer service. We can visibly demonstrate where we are with jobs and who has been assigned. In the past verbally confirming the different stages did not always convince the project leaders that they were being given the actual real time.
• From the Studio users point of view it has empowered them to manage their time more efficiently. If they receive a request to move onto another job their calendars can be reviewed to see if they are available or not.