BQE CORE vs. Copper

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.

If you need to track contract expiration dates of your clients or your prospects that you're trying to sell - Copper is your tool. If you want to track specific products, solutions, vendors, etc. Copper can do it. I use it to track many brands of IT products and services with the use of custom fields to track which prospects/clients have any number of these items. Rather than taking notes, I can select the product from a drop down list that I created VERY EASILY within Copper.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allows for contacts to be synced and organized directly from Gmail.
• Gives a flexible style and customizable settings to match our company's specific needs.
• Does a great job of helping us keep track of projects. We easily created a customized "Status" field with several status options that help us update the many phases of our project.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• 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.

Incentivized

• Window change: for mobile - when you tap on a card from a pipeline it takes you to the lead’s basic info. I wish it would immediately just open all activities so I can quick see notes
• I usually use Copper on the go. When you open the Copper app, it immediately opens a collab window. I wish it had some sort of easy dashboard….plus a notes area. I open Copper on mobile to quickly search for someone’s name or to take quick notes from a sales meeting

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Copper is simple to use and it's simple to figure out the additional functionality you may need or want to use. There are a lot of support articles and the support itself is great. But it's also fairly simple to figure out on your own. It integrates easily with Google Workspace as well.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

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.

Incentivized

There have been a few times when I contacted the "help desk" or "support team" and they just told me to watch a video or join a seminar to learn what I am looking to do. I would have expected someone to take a few minutes and literally walk me through the steps one by one until either I figured it out or accomplished the goal of my request.

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We selected Copper over these other CRMs mainly because of its ability to integrate with Google Workspace. Members of our team have used Salesforce in the past and found it to be a nightmare to work with/on. Candidly, Copper doesn't fill all of our needs so we supplement that with the use of Asana.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• Copper has simplified our CRM and makes it easy for the sales team to keep track of leads and opportunities.
• Copper has allowed us to save money as it is a fairly competitively priced platform.
• Copper has simplified our workflow, allowing us to work more efficiently and save time from tedious data entry.

Incentivized