Aurea CRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management solution that is designed to enable companies to drive customer engagement tools deep into their sales organization. The vendor says with end-to-end capabilities for sales and marketing, this solution provides a one-stop-shop that delivers a compact overview of team activities, sales pipelines, and key performance indicators so companies can set priorities and make informed decisions. The vendor’s value proposition is that the…
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BQE CORE
Score 8.7 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.
I have prepared deeply detailed customised queries to prepare detailed customer reports including markets, segments, classifications and potentials to present to our company management which have been highly appreciated. So, it was well suited in that case. Since I'm traveling a lot for customer visit activities, I frequently need to use it as mobile but it's slightly nightmarish to use its unfriendly search function as well as very slow loading speeds. So, it's less appropriate in that case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since it's providing useful features, I like to use Aurea CRM on my company PC at the office for my daily activities. However, we are in highly digital age via mobile devices particularly smart phones and we need to use softwares even in mobility which is highly weak feature of Aurea CRM and needs to be improved as soon as possible.
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.
I'm not getting in touch directly with Aurea CRM support team member because they have trained our company's IT team members that are in direct contact with Aurea CRM support channel. As far as I know, the overall support for Aurea CRM is quite good and highly prompt in a professional way.
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.
I didn't select Aurea CRM myself. Since our company is global, our headquarter has selected Aurea CRM after certain years of old Oracle based Crm use. As far as I know the old one was having some weaknesses about reporting, analysing via queries, lack of marketing activies etc. That's why our top management has selected Aurea CRM for a better solution which I highly agree with it except terrible mobile use.
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.