BQE CORE vs. FreshBooks vs. HaloPSA

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 recommend FreshBooks to anyone running a service-based business that needs invoicing, time reporting, and accounting tools. FB is adept in all three of these scenarios and isn't overly complicated like similar accounting packages I have used. I love how I can write estimates and proposals, manage the business development process from the software, and quickly convert prospects to invoiced clients.

Incentivized

Having been in IT for 10+ years and used so many different PSA platforms, I must say working with HaloPSA has been simply amazing. Straight out of the box, it's fast. It's feature-rich. It's easy to set up the basics, and the onboarding team was amazing. The onboarding team actually spends time with you, human on human, walking you through the setup and getting it working how you want. No one else does that included. Yeah, sure, you can pay CW and the other huge amounts of money, and they sort of help you, but HaloPSA helps you from the start; it seems they realise if they help set it up correctly in the first place, it reduces support calls. We can run our business from day one - very customer-centric. We have been using HaloPSA for a year now, and there is still plenty to learn and develop on the platform, but every week we are learning new things that we can do. The support team is great; they are humans who understand the issues we face, so they get things working fast. We have suggested some missing features to the dev team, and so far, they have implemented all of them - WOW. Don't get me wrong, as with all platforms, HaloPSA is not perfect. It's young, but it's maturing fast, very fast, and they are getting integrations built with the major players in the IT industry, which is fantastic. Yes, a few times, the link to Xero broke, which was annoying, but unlike the platforms we used in the past, the support team spoke to us and told us what the problem was and got it fixed, so you can't ask for more than that. Their growth has been fantastic to see, but again this has meant a bit of change around with account managers, support personnel, etc., but everyone they bring on is just as good as the last. All in all, migrating to HaloPSA was the best software/platform decision I have made in our business since I began the business. I would recommend HaloPSA to any IT business. Well done, Team HALO. Keep up the awesome work.

• 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

• Invoicing - FreshBooks basically ensures our accountants spend less time on invoices via its automated invoicing system, which sends invoices to our customers and clients alike and also send them regular reminders for them to pay up their bills.
• Collecting business insights - FreshBooks enable our company analysts measure our business performances via data reports provided by FreshBooks' intuitive dashboard. Allowing us do a comparative analysis of key business metrics of a current month against past months and determine if the business is growing.
• Expense tracker - We have recently embraced FreshBooks as an expense tracker for teams at our company branch. Thusfar, FreshBooks has performed very well, making our expense management a perfect operation; ensuring teams do not exceed their planned budget and also eliminating the need for tracking expenses on excel spreadsheets.

Incentivized

• Workflows
• Stock Control
• Quoting

• 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 can brand invoices with my business logo, but I might like to change colours of the invoices themselves to match the rest of my business documents. That isn't a major point at all, but it's something that I'd like to see.
• Freshbooks doesn't remember the categories that similar expenses were previously assigned to. It would be nice if Freshbooks would suggest a category for an already saved vendor, to ensure the consistency of expense reporting.
• The home page of a Freshbooks account has a great graph display of expenses and income, but it only shows the last 6 months. This is still very useful, but I'd like to be able to see this kind of graph for different periods of time.

• Stock control
• There are 3-4 different ways to do that same thing
• Documentation

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

At the current needs of our business, FreshBooks suits us perfectly - it allows online access by our accountant to the system for GST purposes, easy input of expenses and tracking of Profit and Loss statements. FreshBooks customer service is great as well - very understanding and accommodating.

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

FreshBooks is very easy to use even for novices. If you're looking for an online accounting software that is full of features, has great aesthetics and is user-friendly, then this is definitely the software for you. I've been using it for several years now and despite being tempted to switch by other vendors, I like the feel of FreshBooks and it's mobile features.

Incentivized

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

FreshBooks is easy to use and always works!

Incentivized

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 think the support level for FreshBooks is on par with a 6 because the folks behind this application do a fairly good job at providing support for their customer base. I still don't think they are at an elite level when it comes to supporting but are getting there although too slow in my opinion.

Incentivized

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

I haven't changed my mind since my first evaluation. Freshbooks is still meeting my needs, easy to use, etc.

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

FreshBooks does very well in comparison, especially since it is free software for Barclays bank users. Sage software is much worse than FreshBooks. However, Xero and QuickBooks, the market leaders, are still ahead with usability, additional features, reporting, and connection with third-party software providers. We chose FreshBooks as it does everything we require from this type of software.

Incentivized

We have used and tried several other PSA vendors and HaloPSA was our favorite by far. Many others were either much too overly complicated, clunky, slow to respond to issues, incomplete, or they simply failed to deliver on promises made, especially in terms of integrations.

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

• In reality, we do not implement all of its use at the moment in order to determine an adequate ROI.
• In our approach to the use of the system, it seems to us a considerable time saving by achieving the integration of the Mexican subsidiary with its parent located in the US.
• Financial reports meet the necessary USGAAP requirements.

Incentivized

• Improve our technicians efficiency
• Helped improve asset recording
• Knowledge base