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.
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Daylite
Score 8.8 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Daylite is a project management solution built around features such as contact management, scheduling, and sales pipeline tracking.
BQE CORE is well suited for someone that wants to overpay to keep track of time, invoicing, and standard financial metrics. BQE CORE has the opportunity to be a really robust operating system for an architectural practice that wants to understand how projects are going, how they can improve as a studio, and move forward in providing great impact to their clients, all the while, spending less time in a boring software that no architect wants to use. BQE CORE can feel like a necessary thing for a studio to be managing growth well. But it also can be a lot of fun, intuitive, and exciting for an architect that just wants to be an architect. It can be a learning tool. However, it's too clunky, it isn't flexible, only reactive, and backwards looking for KPIs. To integrate with interesting equations of how a firm can look at project success, turn it into a dashboard for the entire studio, that would be fun. The banking cloud feed is one of the worst I have experienced. The lack of reporting customization is awful. And the amount of redundant information that has to be put into a project that you actually want to have phases in, track your allocations, and manage it, is entirely too cumbersome. BQE Core has an AWESOME foundation. But to build the proverbial house, we gotta care about the craft.
Well suited for any size company which needs CRM management. Easy to use. Great for individuals or teams that use Apple products. Daylite and ios expert integration has been key in capturing leads from our website into the Daylite database, plus then if they opt into email marketing, they are entered into the MailChimp database. The web forms also automate the creation of opportunities and are linked with the contacts/companies. Sales Managers with geographical responsibilities can easily filter contacts or projects based on these regions so they only see what they need. Daylite is not appropriate for Windows users.
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.
Daylite allows you to link your email so when you email a client it will link to their contact in Daylite and save the communication so anyone on the team can see all the emails that have been sent between the client and our company.
Daylite allows you to create "opportunities" for the different packages and services we offer. This lets us track where someone is in the process, if they are still thinking about a service, have been sold on it, or are not interested.
Daylite lets you leave notes on the account that everyone on the team can see. This has been so helpful for our company because it lets us drop helpful notes on personal things about the client that would be good for everyone to know.
Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.
The main drawback of Daylite is that it becomes slow on its iOS mobile devices.
Sometimes I face a lot of retries to log into the account. The mobile app needs a change and needs an upgrade. Apps are lacking in giving appointment reminders on time. Sometimes it does not notify on the right time about the appointment with the client.
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.
Navigating CORE is a breeze as the tool is visually organized well. Improvements need to be made to filtering. A more intuitive approach would help with generating reports and utilizing the resource allocation and forecasting tabs. Filtering by resource groups on these tabs are broken which is a huge inconvenience. Overall, though, the tool is easy to use as a whole, and the support team is very responsive and always available to help when you have a question.
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 have never needed to contact support for this product. Although it is suggested I skip this question if I have no applicable experience with it, I don't have the option to skip it. So I will instead attempt to get 50 words in this box as explanation for that.
I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately
Daylite provides authentic services and features with excellent programming. I have also collaborated on the Daylite calendar with Apple Calendar so that I can never leave behind any updates of the future. Moreover, it keeps on updating its feature for giving better services.
BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.
Daylite has been very helpful for new employees to answer their own questions about contacts/passwords, etc.
We found the tiny notification bell to be weak, sometimes a project comes in with a tight deadline and we have to double-check and ask an employee if they saw the notification. More time would be saved by just chatting about the project and its expectations.
A huge benefit is the institutional knowledge that can be had by reading past projects. We've tracked everything, so the history is there.
