BQE CORE vs. Nutshell CRM

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

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.

Incentivized

• Customization - we are able to make Nutshell make the most sense for our company and processes
• Scheduling - the ability to set tasks allows us to never forget a follow-up call or email
• Tags - allow us to prioritize leads and segment our customers and potential customers
• Communication - the ability to tag colleagues in notes for callbacks or updates to accounts is very helpful to keep everyone on the same page
• Email History - being able to blind copy all our email communication to Nutshell, allows us to have email threads and notes all in one place

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• 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.

Incentivized

• integration with email doesn't work as advertised
• would like integration with quickbooks
• If there is a misspelling in any one email address, you can not send a mass email. You must go back and correct each error before it can send.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Extremely easy to use and they help you throughout the process. I find it not challenging, an effective utility to help us prioritize and engage efficiently at a reasonable price point. We enjoy working with the team there and they're easy to access. I've already recommended it to two colleagues

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

Implementation is difficult everytime but this was relatively simple due to the small amount of data we moved

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When I first started with BCI, they were using ACT!. It was hard to navigate and there were a lot of spots for duplicate information that made it hard to know if you were in the right spot or not. Then if you had trouble, you would spend 3 hours on the phone with customer service and often they would not even be able to find a solution. I would not recommend ACT! to anyone. Since getting nutshell, I have learned a bit about Cosential and I know that it is more catered to the construction industry and can help with proposal creation, so I think that may be something we consider in the not-too-near future.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• Nutshell CRM has had a major impact on ROI. The last program we used cost more and had fewer features and accessibility.
• One negative impact is its email functions. As stated before in this review I need to be able to send large attachments and pics through email and Nutshell is very limited when it comes to that.

Incentivized