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
Expensify
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Expensify automates the entire spend management process. Scan receipts, track mileage, submit and approve expenses, manage corporate cards, reimburse employees, pay bills, send invoices, and book travel. Built for individuals and companies of all sizes, anywhere in the world.
$5
per month per user
Xero
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
BQE CORE
Expensify
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Collect
$5
per month per user
Control
$9
per month per user
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE CORE
Expensify
Xero
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
A dedicated app like Expensify does better than a combined platform at the main use case - expense tracking, reporting, and reimbursement. Bigger, wider-scope platforms take more effort or have other features that can occasionally get in the way. We prefer Expensify's simpler, …
SAP Concur is very heavyweight, and is appropriate for a large enterprise Expensify scales to whatever size the business is. In my opinion, Xero is only appropriate for a very small company
The main reason for switching to Xero was the ability for it to handle multiple currencies as well as the integrations available to streamline our bookkeeping.
I started with Xero in 2014 and they seemed to be the leader in online small business accounting. They seemed to have already ironed out a lot of issues and made it very easy to get started. And they quickly ramped up and ironed out solutions to problems. Plus they were …
Previously exclusively a desktop QuickBooks "shop". Hate the version control issues and need to collect and transfer data files to get source documents. Auto bank downloads clunky and not as intuitive as Xero bank recon features. Few clients use FreshBooks - nice customer …
Free Agent was more user-friendly and had *much* better customer support but is really designed for freelancers &/or small companies with regular needs. We used Xero in the end because our accounting firm provided it as part of the service. We were then fairly tied into it due …
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.
I think it's really good for small businesses. At least in the way we use it. It's very good for keeping an eye on employee spending in nearly real time. I'm not sure how it works for larger companies when there is a larger number of people to keep track of.
I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.
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.
Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.
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.
I wish that I could sync accounts on the back end kind of like with banking software, so that Expensify would automatically port over receipts for recurring expenses as soon as they're available
It would be nice to one-click submit an expense all the way through instead of having to attach it to a report
Wackier profile icons? :) Not a big deal. This software is pretty much amazing as it is now, and typically the urge to update and modify very good software leads to poor outcomes!
Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.
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.
We like using the tool and we receive positive feedback from employees and management who use the tool. It saves time and helps us concentrate on the value adding activities so we are very likely to keep using Expensify in the future
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
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.
My rating of 8 out of 10 for Expensify's overall usability reflects its strong performance in empowering individual users and streamlining core expense processes, while acknowledging that there are specific areas, particularly on the administrative or enterprise side, where the user experience could be further refined. Exceptional End-User Experience (for basic tasks).Automation & Time-Saving Features.Clear Workflow for Approvers. Why it's not a perfect 10 (areas for improvement that dock points): Limited corporate bank to choose from, limited multi-currency to pay to ( for instance, as a foreign corporatio,n i cannot pay with my US account to Israeli employees, or pay to our UK employees)
As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
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.
On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.
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.
Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
The implementation process went rather smoothly, linking it to the bank and cards was handled easily. without too many unnecessary steps. Getting the accounts setup did take some time, but that would be true with any organization. All in all things went smoothly and I was very pleased with the setup and implementation process
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
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.
It is definitely 10 times better than using an Excel spreadsheet. We are talking a digitized with AI type capabilities to do the work for you. It’s honestly a lifesaver. This beats manual calculations and data entry any day. Scanning 100 receipts and saving them to pdf files not only takes space on your storage but it is an extra unnecessary step
Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
We went from paying credit card fees with no approval process to a no fees and complex approval processes.
I personally save time in not having to develop a spend report I just have my admin assistent fill in the details of the auto generated report and it is done. Went from an hour long process to 5- 10 minutes max to prepare a high quality audit ready report.
Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.
