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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Futuramo Time Tracker
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Futuramo creates SaaS apps to provide a collaborative workspace for teams. Futuramo Time Tracker is an app used to track, analyze, and manage time, free for teams of up to 3 users, and $6 per license for each additional user.
The reason I think BQE Core is better than our previously used system Futuramo Time Tracker. [It is] more cost effective. I feel as though you get a much better product for not much more money. Another thing is I feel as though BQE Core is very advanced and user-friendly …
BQE CORE is well suited for a firm trying to get a better understanding of their project performance as a whole as well as better manage time and project resources. It is not the greatest for client management through a project or through invoicing, but it is do-able within the system.
Futuramo is best for when you're working alone on a project, or with a small team, given the glitches with the time tracker and the poor integration with Futuramo Tasks and Projects. Unless you're going to manually calculate the times spent on all tasks individually in order to know the total time spent on the project, I would not recommend using it on projects where you'd be billed per the time spent rather than a fixed amount.
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.
The biggest pro of Futurama Time tracker is that it comes bundled with other tools. These are "Projects, Tasks, Virtual Tickets, Time Tracker, and Icons." This means I can track the time spent on each task within a project.
Time Tracker is easy to use, all you need to do is go to time tracker, enter the task you want to track, choose what project and clients it's under, and then click the play/start icon.
For projects that involve collaborating with others (either external freelancers I'm managing, or my staff) I can track the time spent on each task by each user. So I know how long each person spent on their task and how it related to the estimated time. This way I know if the project will take longer or shorter than estimated.
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'ver been using Futuramo for almost 2 years, primarily because they reached out to me to be one of the first users/testers. I've also shared some glitches that could be improved but the timer glitch is still there. When I start the timer to track a project, instead of the timer to start counting, it remains at 00:00 which is worrying because it makes me feel like it's not actually tracking what I'm working on. I was once 18 mins unto a task and when I checked the tracker it said 00:16 I was so worried I ended the task. Interestingly when I ended the task, it showed the correct time which was 18 minutes. I'm happy the timer was working but I'm also frustrated and in near-panic.
Like TopTracker, I wish there was a way to take screenshots of what I'm doing, that way I can be sure that the rest of the team is actually working on the timed tasks.
In the Time Tracker section of Futuramo, where the tasks timed are listed, I wish it was possible to actually click on any of the tasks there to see things like mouse clicks and keyboard taps. Similar to how Hubstaff and Upwork tracker tracks "productivity" (I'm not sure what this is called).
If you track a task not originally in Futuramo Task but created in Time Tracker, connected to a project or client, when you go to Futuramo Task, it won't be listed there. And when you to go Futuramo Projects, you still wouldn't see it there. I would like to go to Futuramo Project and see all the tasks there, both those timed and those yet to start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Increased productivity: Futuramo Time Tracker makes it easy to know how long it'll actually take me to complete a task, and when put together, how long it'd take me to complete a project.
Track Billables: While calculating all the time spent on each task manually was exhausting, once that was done, I knew how long it took me and my team to complete a project and was able to bill my client for just that time.
