BQE CORE vs. PSA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
BQE CORE
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
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.N/A
PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
N/A
Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
$15
per month
Pricing
BQE COREPSA
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE COREPSA
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
BQE COREPSA
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
8.1
49 Ratings
7% above category average
PSA
-
Ratings
Task Management8.831 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Management9.232 Ratings00 Ratings
Gantt Charts6.613 Ratings00 Ratings
Scheduling8.321 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow Automation7.722 Ratings00 Ratings
Team Collaboration8.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology9.310 Ratings00 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology6.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Document Management6.824 Ratings00 Ratings
Email integration7.021 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Access9.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking9.449 Ratings00 Ratings
Change request and Case Management8.717 Ratings00 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management7.537 Ratings00 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
8.4
34 Ratings
12% above category average
PSA
-
Ratings
Quotes/estimates7.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Invoicing8.829 Ratings00 Ratings
Project & financial reporting8.733 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with accounting software8.420 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BQE COREPSA
Small Businesses
FunctionFox
FunctionFox
Score 8.3 out of 10
Atera
Atera
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
Planview AdaptiveWork
Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 6.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
Planview AdaptiveWork
Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 6.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BQE COREPSA
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(142 ratings)
6.0
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.2
(8 ratings)
7.0
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(100 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(89 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
3.0
(6 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BQE COREPSA
Likelihood to Recommend
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects).
With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
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Pros
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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.
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Upland Software
  • We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
  • Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
  • Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
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Cons
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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.
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Upland Software
  • Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
  • Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
  • (The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
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Likelihood to Renew
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
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Usability
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
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Reliability and Availability
BQE Software Inc.
I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
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Upland Software
No answers on this topic
Performance
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
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Online Training
BQE Software Inc.
Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
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Upland Software
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
BQE Software Inc.
It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.
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Upland Software
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
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Alternatives Considered
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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Upland Software
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
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Scalability
BQE Software Inc.
This software works on a small and large scale.
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Upland Software
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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
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Upland Software
  • Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
  • We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
  • A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
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ScreenShots

BQE CORE Screenshots

Screenshot of Core powered by BQE SoftwareScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Dashboard ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE 360* Firm Performance ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE Reporting & AnalyticsScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Time EntryScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Expense Tracking