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
Harvest
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Harvest is an expense management, time tracking, and budgeting tool from Harvest in New York. It supports many accounting solutions as an add-on (e.g. Quickbooks, Xero), or it can function in a standalone fashion for some small businesses that have simple expense tracking and also invoicing needs. It's time tracking feature is its core, though it also automates invoices, with estimates, integration with commonly used gateways (e.g. Paypal), multiple currency support, automated reminders, and…
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.
Harvest salt or immediate need for a replacement time tracking system that had become out of financial reach. It was a simple solution that everyone in our organization picked up really quickly. For myself at the administrative level, I have had no trouble adding clients, adjusting tasks, migrating tasks and running reports. I am unsure as to the best practices at this time for a particular clients that have very specific price rate associated to very specific roles, it will still list the roles that we do not want in the drop-down menu and I would really like to eliminate that. I do not want room for error or for any particular user to pick the wrong task. It still lists them as non-billable but there are no non-billable hours associated to that client, so we don’t need those at all on the drop down.
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.
Offers several options on using the tool, for example, you can use the app on your phone, the app for desktop, or simply have the website open.
The timer integrates with other platforms. For example, our team uses Asana as our project management tool. Now, in real-time, I can know which projects my team is working on and whether we're implementing good time management strategies to meet our goals.
The summary break downs are wonderful! You can view an individual's hours as well as project hours. There are even notifications you could receive when your team is getting close to reaching the allotted time for a client's project.
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 it can be difficult to find the item that you're looking for, as there are tabs for time, projects, team, reports etc. and it's not always clear where the item you're looking for will be housed.
It would be nice if things could be broken out more clearly by department, as sometimes the entire organization will be added to a new project when really only a couple of people should have.
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.
I have not actually had any customer support issues as the product just works for me and I have not needed it. So using that as the basis of making my assessment on support I would reckon the team are pretty responsive and attentive to customer needs. I have only used the solution on Chrome and Android so have no idea what the experience is like on other browsers or phone operating systems.
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
Harvest is significantly better than Jira. I think Jira's is not originally intended to be used as a time logging/management system, but we had been previously using it as that. It was much clunkier, and many employees had a difficult time using it as a user interface goes. Harvest is much more user friendly and has simplified the daily time-logging process for everyone in our office
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.
