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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Invoiced
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Invoiced in Austin offers their invoicing and AR automation platform, providing a platform for collecting online payments or presenting electronic invoices, AR analytics, and support for subscription-based business management on higher service tiers with subscription analytics (e.g. churn, pricing plan management, etc.).
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.
A 1-10 employee company with no accounting system integration needs and no customization may be suited for Invoiced. Although I wish I could, I cannot in good faith recommend any other scenario for which Invoiced is the right solution. Perhaps a subscription service that is very streamlined on autopay could work as well, but I cannot speak to that scenario directly. I do not think Invoiced can be trusted to integrate with accounting software, certainly not NetSuite, given the aforementioned reasons. There is a very high risk of system failures, connection breaks, improper code built into the core bundles, and they will blame the company for anything that is not totally standard operations. In summary, if your business does anything unique at all from a transaction lens, I would be very careful as Invoiced may promise to handle it in a Sales pitch, and then 9 months later it could still be unsolved. All the while, they are charging you even if the product is not launched, and they also will not let you terminate, because Invoiced will deny a "breach" even in the face of a directly observable example just to ride out the contract and keep all the money.
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.
Communication is the #1 failure - the Invoiced contract Term starts PRE-launch on day 1, yet Invoiced had an extremely slow and encumbered way of onboarding and trying to set us up.
Core Product: In our testing, their core product broke numerous times, and if this were in a live scenario we would have been devastated. Be very careful as they don't take ownership for maintaining their integrations with all software, and things can break at any moment with updates
Systems: Invoiced rolled out updates that contained faulty code and damaged our accounting system. The lack of expertise, at least in NetSuite, is very dangerous and I recommend having in-house develops watch Invoiced's moves very carefully if you do end up trying to use them.
Lack of Ownership: We tried to terminate multiple times, only be to requested over and over that they can fix the problems. We gave them more time since we were so heavily invested from a time perspective, but they did not own the failures and we were even lied to directly by senior management in a remarkable failure to adhere to basic deadlines.
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 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
We selected Invoiced primarily due to their purported high level of customizations and flexibility to handle differing business needs. That, unfortunately, became the exact reason we terminated the contract though. They have a basic framework for something that could be really great, and the potential is there, but they lack the in-house expertise and the product is far too infantile at present. Major bugs and similar issues need to be stamped out first. I can only hope they take it as a learning experience.
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.
