Likelihood to Recommend I believe it is well suited for our industry! We are professional services consulting firm and we need this! However if there is a smaller company who does not need to track these items, then they should not use this big of a platform
Read full review This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
Read full review Pros I like the functionality of being able to make payments electronically and the amount of banks and payment methods that are available. Another very useful feature of this tool is that the system allows to set a parameter to perform automatic invoices. I also really like the amount of templates that this tool has. Since it allows us to make customizable reports to our clients. Read full review Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with. Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow. OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages). Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly. During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires. OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Its been a huge help in saving time and making billing more efficient. Would like to see the product grow and be able to continue to use it.
Read full review It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems. Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir. OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
Read full review Usability Staff adapted to the new timesheets immediately. The invoice platform is nice and tracking WIP is great! Color backgrounds still need work. The new vibrant mode is OK. still trying it out.
Read full review In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
Read full review Reliability and Availability BigTime is available 99% of the time. At times there are bugs, but most are resolved quickly
Read full review The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.
Read full review Performance have not noticed a slow integration issue using QBO
Read full review The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
Read full review In-Person Training Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
Read full review Online Training We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
Read full review Implementation Rating Monte and Tyler have been helpful with report assistance I called on recently
Read full review It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used. Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem. It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before. Read full review ScreenShots BigTime Software Screenshots