BQE CORE vs. Emburse Abacus

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.

Abacus is great for smaller companies that need to automate expense management. It is a very user-friendly system that makes it easy for all employees to understand without any training. We have heard of issues with their AMEX program. Companies that have tens or hundreds of corporate AMEX cards should likely explore other options

Incentivized

• 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

• It is a very useful platform it helps me effectively, it allows me to put restrictions on the dates, till a card could be used.
• Embrace Abacus has provided me much relief and saved my time which was spent in chalking out the financial status of my organization.
• Emburse Abacus has equipped me with amazing features which are helping me to automatically set various limits about the expenditures and I always remain up to date about any purchase.

• 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

• I think this just has to do with how we use it but when go in to select a "category" or "event," it looks a little cluttered and can be hard to find what you are looking for.
• It will not allow you to attach 2 items unless you are doing a split. This is not really an issue but there are times where I would like to include a screenshot with additional information and I have to put everything into one picture.

Incentivized

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

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

I have never had to contact Abacus support and have not heard stories from any of my colleagues having to do so either. Our accounting department stresses the ease of Abacus and has not voiced any concerns with the software or the product support team or the product support process.

Incentivized

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

wont let me skip

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 migrated from SAP Concur to Emburse Abacus after carefully considering a number of factors. Total cost of ownership, new user training and adoption, direct integration with our ERP, and the ability to process individual expenses in real-time as opposed to processing monthly expense reports all weighed in Abacus' favor during the decision and selection process.

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

• It does seem like they are still working out some kinks in the web and mobile apps – a few times the app has crashed. But they're also very fast to push updates.
• The benefits are simple. No one likes taking time out of their day to do expense reporting. Abacus speeds that process up considerably. The interface is clean, and I'm able to see what expenses are pending vs. expenses that are already cleared.
• The benefit from a user standpoint is that it adds an element of organization to a process that is typically disorganized. It has saved us numerous hours.

Incentivized