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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MIP Fund Accounting
Score 8.7 out of 10
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MIP Fund Accounting™ is a configurable fund accounting solution. The solution includes functionality for fund accounting, procurement, budgeting, payroll, human resources, timekeeping, fixed asset management, grant management, and dashboards for nonprofits and government agencies.
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.
MIP Fund Accounting is well suited for compiling data from multiple sources into one digestible system. It is relatively straightforward to navigate. I have 3 billing software programs that I am responsible for bringing together for our CFO to make decisions, and follow GAAP, and MIP Fund Accounting is extremely suitable for that. I consider MIP Fund Accounting to be a bit too dense for smaller companies with little to no relative complexity to their financial/organizational structure.
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.
General Ledger processing, including journal entries and reports
Ability to download all reports directly to Excel and PDF formats
Use of Grant codes to enable grant reporting by month/quarter/year
Ability to have multiple departments and consolidate into groups for reporting
Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable cannot be out of balance
Multiple ways to use the product including Cloud and Classic options, Visual menu or Standard (Top of screen) menus to select processes, many options we are not using in our simple organization
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.
My #1 request would have a report that can pull from all modules. There are some reports that I have to run in separate areas to compile the data I want. If there were a one-stop-shop report center, that would be fantastic.
I would love to have an option to make text size bigger in all parts of the system.
We are in CA; I would like to see call center coverage to account for the time change to Texas.
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.
I would give this software a high ranking for my use of it because I have a lot of experience setting it up properly. What I would like to learn more about this program is it's Drillpoint add on feature as this has a lot of potential to allow managers instant access to their financials and invoices when set up correctly
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.
I have been working with MIP Fund Accounting for over 20 years and have come to appreciate the overall usability of it. However, for new users of this software, it may come across as not being user friendly an d can be quite confusing
Mostly its available when I need it. I do get kicked out of the cloud while entering data at times. But I do not lose data and can often just open up the classic version to continue doing what I was doing. Only rarely is there no availability and when that happens, its a very short amount of time.
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.
We are able to generate reports in any format that we need to show the information that we have in a clear way that is easy for staff and our boards to read. We can easily run the reports agency-wide or break them down by fund or project, showing the details that we need.
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 reached out to MIP for technical support; however, their website offers great help resources so I can solve an issue on my own. Another team member reached out to MIP for support and was helped quickly. The transition process took longer than expected due to a lag in communication.
There are no specifics on what happens if you make one choice or another to know which is the best selection. This is true for JVs and AP. In training we were not given specifics of what happens when one possibility is selected over another.
Denise O'Malley provided training for the HR module when we added it to our system. Denise also gave us a demo of the EWS module which we were able to see that it would not meet our needs. She was very kind about and understanding regarding the functions we needed with a time clock system.
Don't waste your time with MIP. There are plenty of other softwares out there that will do the job better. Do your homework. Get references from actual users. Make sure that what you choose will truly integrate. Make sure that there is local support. Get training. You will be glad that you passed this one by. Trust 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
This is the first time I've worked in the non-profit world. Accounting is somewhat different so I am very glad to be using a product designed specifically for non-profits. Many accounting processes are similar of course, but it is nice to have them tailored to fit the requirements of a non-profit organization.
Not real sure what you mean by scalability. It seems to be able to handle all of the funds we are currently working with. If you mean the looks of it, some things are small and it would be nice to increase the size according to the user.
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.
