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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Harpoon
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Harpoon is a web-hosted accounting and finance app that helps freelancers and consultants set and meet their financial goals. In addition, Harpoon provides useful tools to help users collect revenue and manage finances. Features include time tracking, invoicing, expense tracking, project scheduling and more. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution that helps users boost their freelancing career.
BQE CORE is well suited for someone that wants to overpay to keep track of time, invoicing, and standard financial metrics. BQE CORE has the opportunity to be a really robust operating system for an architectural practice that wants to understand how projects are going, how they can improve as a studio, and move forward in providing great impact to their clients, all the while, spending less time in a boring software that no architect wants to use. BQE CORE can feel like a necessary thing for a studio to be managing growth well. But it also can be a lot of fun, intuitive, and exciting for an architect that just wants to be an architect. It can be a learning tool. However, it's too clunky, it isn't flexible, only reactive, and backwards looking for KPIs. To integrate with interesting equations of how a firm can look at project success, turn it into a dashboard for the entire studio, that would be fun. The banking cloud feed is one of the worst I have experienced. The lack of reporting customization is awful. And the amount of redundant information that has to be put into a project that you actually want to have phases in, track your allocations, and manage it, is entirely too cumbersome. BQE Core has an AWESOME foundation. But to build the proverbial house, we gotta care about the craft.
I think Harpoon works best for freelancers, consultants, self employed people and smaller companies with less client to bill. For larger enterprises with hundreds or thousands of clients, there are larger, more intricate platforms in the market that are better suited for those needs.
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.
Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.
Sometimes expense reporting bring up duplicate transactions, which may be more of a fault of the API that connects my account, which is Plaid
Would be nice if in the future, they can offer ACH as one of the payment options for invoices
There are some redundancies that pop up when setting time frames for client work and the projects attached to them. If they aren't aligned, it can cause inaccurate reporting. If it just sent it once and it took care of both functions, it would be easier
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.
Navigating CORE is a breeze as the tool is visually organized well. Improvements need to be made to filtering. A more intuitive approach would help with generating reports and utilizing the resource allocation and forecasting tabs. Filtering by resource groups on these tabs are broken which is a huge inconvenience. Overall, though, the tool is easy to use as a whole, and the support team is very responsive and always available to help when you have a question.
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.
I have never needed to contact support for this product. Although it is suggested I skip this question if I have no applicable experience with it, I don't have the option to skip it. So I will instead attempt to get 50 words in this box as explanation for that.
The few times I've needed help or had questions about the platform, the founder got back to me. And fairly fast. The extra effort resonated well with me
I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately
I've used Less Accounting and & Quickbooks Online. After Less Accounting was acquired, its development was mostly stopped. While the tool was a simple way to manage invoices and expenses, its directional philosophy changed with the new owners. Quickbooks Online was a solid tool, but the company support was unhelpful and hard to work with at times. Harpoon provides a great tool, with a company that cares about its users.
BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.
