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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Workamajig
Score 6.1 out of 10
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Workamajig is a project management system with capabilities such as file sharing, resource management, and revenue projection.
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.
If you're looking for a system to help you address accounting that's not suited for marketing agency structures, this is the right tool. It is a bit cumbersome, but it has streamlined our reporting, billing, estimating, and tracking. As for project management, it's great that it integrates with the estimating and finances, but it's just not enjoyable to use. The interface is clunky. So if project management is your main criteria, I'd choose something else. We would never use it to collaborate with clients either because I'd be afraid of making them frustrated by the tool, so we use Basecamp to do that.
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.
The Platinum version has a particularly robust time tracking system, down to a 'timer' function that can be critical for an agency like mine where you want to be accountable for billing a client arruately
The ability to make projects available only to those who are permitted to assign their time to it has apparently been very helpful during our revenue reconciliation meetings where time incurred is reviewed against scope
The mobile app, while I still feel needs some work, is pretty handy for a quick calendar check if I'm in a client meeting and cannot utilize my browser to get information
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.
WMJ's interface is dated. Despite an html5 driven "sheets"-based interface, it takes a lot of time and effort to manage the interface, which could be streamlined considerably. On a UX/UI scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, WMJ would earn a 6 from me.
Despite the amount of documentation available, there is a distinct lack of clarity in that documentation, and it doesn't fully cover everything you would expect. Branching thoughts, for instance, are not addressed. Additionally, because there are two editions of the software online, there are two support sites that aren't sequestered. So information from both commingles, creating confusion.
Support is available on an email and phone basis. They strongly encourage you to use email, however, and they are resistant to phone time. This is likely because the support staff is limited in number, but has a great depth of knowledge. If you want immediate phone support, however, YOU ARE OUT OF LUCK. You are placed in a queue and the odds of same-day help are low. For email, the response is usually within an hour, but when you are stuck with a configuration issue, or need to generate a report and don't know how to do something, waiting is not optimal. That said, the support team is TERRIFIC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Workamajig was definitely a lot easier to keep track of projects, timesheets, and out of office calendars all in one. ClickUp and Zoho were good for project management but JIG definitely has more to offer and it's a little easier to clean. Keeping track of campaigns is much easier in JIG as it assigns project numbers and task numbers to each assignment.
