BQE CORE vs. Function Point Productivity Software

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.

FunctionPoint (FP) is great for agencies performing any type of task oriented work. If your workflow cannot be broken down into a set of outlined and easy to define tasks (even if the output of the task is abstract) then FunctionPoint would be difficult to implement. FunctionPoint is fantastic at defining scope in an engagement and forcing those who execute the work to stay within that scope if tasks are well-defined. If your work requires a lot of group collaboration and sharing of tasks, you may struggle with FunctionPoint's inability to share a single task simultaneously

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

• Financial analysis and reporting is one of the tool's primary differentiators
• Function Point has tremendous support and is very helpful when we have questions or issues
• Time tracking and project management is also very solid
• Estimating, statements of work and new project setup is very easy

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

• Reporting- FP offers many pre-loaded reporting functions but sometimes all of this amounts to our job summaries and not specifics.
• Employee calendar/scheduling- FP does a lot for us and streamlines our processes but one of the main aspects it's lacking is the ability to use the system for employee management like PTO requests, Out of Office, Working Elsewhere, etc.

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

The support team is one of the friendliest and most responsive I've ever worked with. They are hobbled, however, by a software implementation backlog, buggy software, and a pricing structure that will drive you away.

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 have not looked into other productivity software platforms, we found Function Point and were sold on the capabilities and customer service aspects from their team.

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

• Function Point helped us move from separate systems into one semi-integrated system, proving that integration was efficient and important.
• Function Point was so bug-riddled that it cost us days and weeks in lost productivity.

Incentivized