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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HotSchedules
Score 6.4 out of 10
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HotSchedules is a cloud-based scheduling, labor and communication management software solution serving the restaurant and hospitality industry. According to the vendor, key benefits include: Build & Communicate Schedules The scheduling and labor management software reduces the time it takes managers to create and communicate schedules. All scheduling and employee information is stored in one central location, so managers have access to time-off requests,…
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.
For small to medium-sized companies HotSchedules works great when business is very static. If you are simply using HotSchedules for a schedule writing tool, it is phenomenal. However, it does miss the mark as a labor control software. Needs more controls to keep managers aware of spending versus historical sales data.
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.
Communication is so simple on HotSchedules. Whether it is communicating a new schedule release, or a quick note about tonight's shift we as managers are able to easily communicate and know that it will reach our team through text notifications, or email notifications.
The Meal Break planning tool is very useful in being able to help our floor leaders clearly understand and plan for what breaks are needed throughout the shift. This allows them to come up with a strategic game plan quickly and spend more time with our guests.
Shift Swaps and Releases are so seamless. This is our favorite tool as it makes helping our team cover shifts extremely easy and painless. On the flip side it also makes staff who want more hours be able to find what is available in real time.
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.
Clocking In and out can be a little slow. It takes longer to clock in then our previous method. Before we just had a card you swiped and it would clock you in. Took 2 seconds. Now with the Hotschdules method we use it take 30 seconds or so. Not a huge issue but it can add up if you have one computer and a line of employees waiting to clock in.
Time Cards. It does not allow you to view someones current time until the "punch" has ended. If the manager would like to check what time the employee clocked in/out from lunch they have to wait until the employee has clocked out for the day before the record is generated. As a shift lead you may send and employee to lunch but forget to note what time you sent them. Awhile passes and you feel like they should be back by now, so you want to go in and see what time they left for lunch but it does not show you that punch record because the employee is still "clocked in" they are just on their "Meal Break"
The ability to customize the restrictions for Clocking in and out. You can set it up so that employees can only clock in from a specific location, however if you have a manager who is allowed to work from home they would not be able to clock in without being at the same location as set in the software. It would be nice to see it able to be customized per user.
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.
6 Years of Experience provides me the insight on the upgrades and changes that HotSchedules has done to improve the experience of its users. There are so many features that we still have not started or used to the fullest, but we believe that we are currently getting a strong value out of the money that is paid for this product.
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.
On rare occasions a phone call has been required to find the solution to a problem, the HotSchedules response staff have been helpful, courteous, and genuinely seem to care for their clients and take pride in what they do. The consistent development and fine tuning of the platform, interface, and mobile environment shows that this is not a program full of people who rest on their laurels.
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.
I have not used any other Scheduling software for employees. As a campground manager in the summer season, we are using campground master for reservations. it is very similar in process to employee scheduling. the ability to the user of that program to set up their own parameters for time and reservations is something that would benefit the employee scheduling software.
Saving time on scheduling means our managers can focus more on guest experience, managing the floor and other areas that contribute to the success of our business.
