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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Nutshell
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Nutshell offers a CRM with contact management, calendar sync, click-to-call, and collaboration features.
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.
This can be used for different industries, healthcare, IT, retail or any company with a customer service line, big or small. if i had to ask, i would say "Do you have any type of filing system that you use?" "anything where you are keeping track of personal/ business information." Do you need access to information on a day to day basis? If they do , then this can be used , especially if you need to keep track of the numbers; we like how we can see if are things going up or 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.
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.
SWOT analysis --- currently we put this in as custom fields but they don't link up at all and are hard to read/navigate. We also use the custom fields for other information we want to capture. It would be nice to build those in so they can show the info as bullet points or something --- currently paragraph form and hard to find things at a glance.
Funnel could use some work. Only shows how many leads are currently in that part of the pipeline which doesn't give us a good historical comparison.
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.
This is perfect for a small business / Home based business with SaaS. Nutshell constantly adds new features and the price is much better than more robust software like Salesforce.
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.
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.
Nutshell's support team has always been great and they tend to go above and beyond. They are polite, friendly, personable and great listeners. They are also great about sending follow up emails too.
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.
Well, my team had trials for these others and they all prefer Nutshell for different reasons. I prefer it as I need a user-friendly software to help me out as I am not a big tech guy. I have heard others in the office say things like they like the way activities are scheduled better, or the way nothing ever gets accidentally erased if they hard crash or power goes out.
Nutshell's mobility has provided significant ROI for me since we've started using the CRM. I've been able to provide immediate feedback to clients, schedule meetings from the field with confidence, and much more.
Nutshell's tagging features have helped us craft custom mailing/email lists. We struggled to do this in the past.
