BigTime IQ is time and expense tracking software from Chicago-based BigTime Software.
$20
User per Month
BQE CORE
Score 8.8 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
monday.com
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
After all the research and demos I watched, I had narrowed it down to BQE CORE & BigTime Software. We actually started w/ BQE CORE, which is an incredibly robust software with a lot of great abilities. It ended up being way more robust than we needed or wanted. We switched …
We paid for BigTime and started to implement it so we could have one package with accounting as well. BQE Core didn't have the online payment selection and we had trouble years ago with integrating with QuickBooks. In trying to set up BigTime, the migration of previous and …
monday.com is so much easier to use & project-tracking is not only easy to do, but the visuals are far from complicated & make it that much easier to keep track of everything.
I'd like to start by saying, I rarely give 10's on anything, almost always 9's, the main reason for my 10 rating is the support I've received from this team/company. BigTime Software has been well suited for our company b/c it's giving a window into the project budget and time frames to our Project Managers to proactively manage their projects and look for areas to improve and celebrate with support staff. I would say efficiency in time management. BigTime Software is not an accounting software and I love that about it. We were looking for a tool for staff to manage their projects and stay on budget and track time and generate invoices all in one place and we've found that with BigTime Software.
I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.
The platform has a good deal of versatility and extensibility, but I do not feel it is well suited for anything too complex. More complexity seems to bog down performance and increase maintenance to keep everything humming. As much as possible, avoid creating too many bespoke workarounds that will end up creating tech debt. The platform seems to work best for more straightforward scenarios and smaller to mid-size companies. Pricing can be reasonable for specific teams, but can feel a little too pricey for company-wide usage. It has served us well for the early stages of our company, but we find ourselves offloading the more complex use cases to other apps specifically developed for those, and reducing to just those teams that are more deeply embedded in the functionality.
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.
I like summary of subitems, especially with subitasks as subitems and add item tracking for each subtask it can show total tracked in parent item. Similar with other columns, like numbers, status, date.
Dashboard features, Many kinds of dashboard view available, we can utilize on the basis of requirements.
monday.com workform is very powerful, easily share form link when submitted it will create line item in board with provided data.
monday.com automation is very helpful in order to automate steps with specific rules and easy setup.
monday.com also provides integrations in order to automate processes if need to integrate multiple app together. or need to transfer data between multiple apps.
For some types of projects, we are unable to use BigTime's invoicing feature. It would be nice if we could further customize invoices to fit our needs. We still have to use Quickbooks to complete certain invoices.
Being able to create Purchase Orders in BigTime would be extremely useful to us. We currently use Quickbooks for this.
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.
I would like to see our company logo show up larger on the form feature.
I prefer the version of the form they have now instead of the new version for 2025. The current form shows the questions in bold font, and the new version does not. This may mean it could take our volunteers longer to get to the pertinent information on the form.
It would be nice if monday.com staff had monthly webinars showing how to use some features. such as, using formulas effectively.
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.
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
Overall most areas of the software are easy to use. I tend to spend a lot of time in analytics and reports. Those are not as user friendly, in my opinion, and could use some improvements. I think it just takes time to get familiar with where items are stored in the program and what changes affect what.
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.
I give monday.com a 10/10 because I almost never encounter any lag or connectivity issues despite all of the many templates, boards, and automations we have. As a matter of fact, I feel like the last issue I encountered was over a year ago... and I'm in monday.com every single work day. Not only is monday trustworthy, it is easy to find what I'm looking for... making the overall usability extremely hard to beat.
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.
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
The support is amazing! They are always available through the chat interface in the program. Each support person has fully answered my questions the first time. I have had a positive experience with each inquiry. It is very important to me that I am able to get instant access to help so that I can make the most of the software and all of its capabilities.
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.
monday.com only really care about accounts that have 20 seats or more. While this is great for monday.com, it pushes smaller organisations to evaluate alternatives. We rate monday.com highly in our organisation because key staff have already got good experience with the application and we know we will get to 20+ seats one day. But, till then the billing model and lack of permanent enterprise features is a dread.
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
I touched on this briefly, in another survey section, but my implementation manager, Kevin, was exceptional. The actual implementation process took 3 months, not 1 before I was comfortable rolling it out to staff. We also had to wait/schedule time and coordinate for our custom xml. invoice to be generated and in a place we felt comfortable sending it out to clients. In the end I was very satisfied, but during the first few months it was challenging.
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
I liked the client management, but it didn't do time tracking, billing or syncing with quickbooks. It was too robust for my needs. I tried it for the client management and thought I might use it along with bigtime, but it was too cumbersome and would involve too much double entry. And it didn't track time or bill which are necessary functions
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.
monday.com is cleaner, offers more customization and is easier to design out with a team project focus in mind. With the ability to automate steps as well, it is super easy to move tasks along, have stages auto-update and to go through my personal to-do list of tasks to get things done.
The product is useful for faster billing and efficient timesheet logs. I do like the report features however there are many options and can be overwhelming for the user. It is most helpful to set up reports speaking to an agent to ensure the right fields are set, etc.
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
Before BigTime, we were using Excel to track everything, creating invoices, and run reports. Getting on BigTime has saved us tons of time and effort which equates to dollars saved on labor.
From a legal standpoint, BigTime has allowed us to be organized and prepared in the event we would need to present financial details to anyone.
Much easier to review my prior month and report to clients on work completed; easy to extract the information and work done to Excel to add budget tracking etc - I see this is possible in monday.com and I will investigate how/if this is possible on our current plan.
Very fast and easy set-up of Boards.
Still lots to learn and grasp - many more opportunities to become more efficient using monday.com. I'm only just getting started.
The initial automations are quick and easy to set up, and if set up correctly.
My month-end client status and progress reports are now more accurate, and I can keep track of all the information in one place (inside monday.com).
