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
ClickUp
Score 8.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform. It’s a hub where teams can come together to plan, organize, and collaborate on work using tasks, Docs, Chat, Goals, and Whiteboard. Customized with just a few clicks, ClickUp helps teams of all types and sizes deliver work more effectively, to boost productivity to new heights. ClickUp aims to make the world more productive by removing friction caused by using many different applications. The platform boasts millions…
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.
Great for project management, reoccurring task management, building trackers and keeping track of what everyone is up to. Like all software that has great functionality, having solid governance and control over access is essential. I recommend ensuring that your admins/owners have a close eye on what is going on across the space or it can turn into an unmanageable nightmare.
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.
It has been a game-changer in terms of project tracking, as animation is a demanding product that requires multiple layers of analysis, revisions, tracking, scheduling, etc. ClickUp simplifies many approvals as anyone can easily add items, and you can tag the people who need to look at them.
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.
Far easier to use than any other PM tool. ClickUp is incredibly intuitive and had us saving time and energy within the first week of implementation. In my opinion, PM software should make it easier to focus on the deliverables - it shouldn't take all your time and energy to learn how to use the tool in the first place. ClickUp is a user-friendly tool that actually helps us focus on what's important.
For over a year ClickUp was unavailable to us just twice for a couple of hours. I would say for a system this big and working globally that was a minor issue. They managed to fix all the issues within a couple hours and then it was back up and running perfectly fine.
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.
The speed of ClickUp is average to be honest. This is one of the biggest flaws of the system, sometimes it's also lagging a little bit but we also have a lot of documents, lists etc. on our workspace. However, with the next version of ClickUp I've seen they are planning to increase the speed by almost 500%, probably by changing the technology, so I am more than looking forward to it.
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 started using ClickUp when it was what most would consider a baby company. There were the occasional bugs that made working in ClickUp a little bit of a headache, but the support feature allowed me to chat with a real persona and communicate my issues. I would always get prompt support and someone willing to really help me, not just point me to FAQ pages. Not feeling like a number really makes a difference.
There are multiple guides on literally all of the functions you can find within the system, therefore it's easy to learn anything you'd really like to use, starting from project and people management, down to Gantts, mind maps, time tracking, inviting Clients as guests to work with you on the projects and so much more.
Start small. Don’t try to build the most elaborate plans first. Resist the urge to get into Gantt charts if no one is used to them. Just get work written, add dates and assignees, and start getting used to it. If you did not use a work management tool before, you need to be gracious with yourself about the fact that you likely do not have the muscle memory for working this way yet. But you will get there.
And leverage people who know it if possible. Look for ClickUp experts and vendors. They can really supercharge your effectiveness at building the tool out and speed up the process.
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.
I did not make the decision to move to ClickUp, but I did provide feedback and hear feedback from our internal team about how ClickUp centralizes a lot of the company wides resources into one space. I feel that ClickUp provides more dynamic workflow building beyond Jira and Karbon, and tasks and questions are more searchable cross team, causing more time saved and less time reaching out to ask for an update. All Apps have their individual strengths, but ClickUp has it all live together in one space, making it easier overall for searching and updating items internally as a team.
Scaling with ClickUp is superb. If you create a workflow best suited for your organization then it's all about creating new accounts and teaching the new employees the workflow you're using. It's that simple. There is no black magic when it comes to Clickup.
Before ClickUp, my team would have multiple different project trackers, all in different locations, formatted in different ways. ClickUp has allowed us to move all those trackers into one location with a specified template and the ability to directly link tasks to tickets. This has greatly impacted project deliveries in a very positive way.
The time tracking feature of ClickUp has been amazing for our development team. Instead of them having to track in a separate document or at the end of every day, try to remember what they worked on and when, they instead can just hit a timer button on the ticket and go off to work. This alone has saved time and improved the accuracy of tracked time to projects.
