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
monday.com
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
monday.com is so much easier to use & project-tracking is not only easy to do, but the visuals are far from complicated & make it that much easier to keep track of everything.
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.
monday.com has very clear default views that are easy to follow, simple to update and amend. Automations are really easy to set up, but you need a good idea of what you want to do and the order it needs to be done in. The options available on Automations are improving all the time.
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.
Automation/integrations - Choosing from template automation or creating your own, integrate across platforms.
Dashboards - Different views i.e. kanban, gantt chart, tables, forms.
All info in one place - Add all of the necessary files for each task inside of Monday; don't need to go looking for ages in different folders on our internal system, add comments, and add assignees to each task—very content-rich way of presenting information.
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.
The billing model is awful for small businesses! monday.com makes you feel like they are doing you a favour. You literally pay for seats you don't use. The billing model should be a per seat model!
There are too many addons from monday.com and 3rd party vendors that you have to pay for. The value of those addons is debatable are often rebuildable outside of monday.com in a single use spreadsheet (which pay monthly for an addon that you only need to use once in a while?) or organisations are already using something else in their tech stack for that addon.
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.
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
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.
The templates are great because it gives you a starting point and then you're able to tailor it to the way YOU want it. I use a lot of trial and error in figuring out how to do certain things, but did learn last week that I'm able to reach out to Monday support and set up a call and they help me with what I'm wanting to accomplish.
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.
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
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.
Fast response from a human, when a human is needed. AI bot gives initial response to my question. Often, the bot response is all I needed to proceed. Best feature is the AI Assistant for writing one-line programs in the Formula columns. The AI Assistant is much smarter than me and adds in well-appreciated items for my formulas. Including column checks and Function suggestions
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
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.
We used an excel spreadsheet to track our month end close process previously which created a lot of issues around only one person being able to be in the checklist at any given time. Additionally, we were unable to have excel notify us when a task we need to have completed was done, but Monday.com has completely changed that for us!
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
My favourite example? We used it to take a failed start-up, one where the prime investor was considering pulling out - to being a listed business (EURONEXT) within 18 months. That business now has a market cap at around $200m.
Turnaround of a struggling health tech venture that was buried under endless spreadsheets by its investors - from loss-making to £2M EBITDA in two -years.
Offshoring - Through the adoption of Monday as a key workstream management tool (moving off JIRA) we were able to reduce resource costs by over £2m per annum, without any change in efficiency or quality.
