BQE CORE vs. OpenAir PSA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
BQE CORE
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
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
OpenAir PSA
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.N/A
Pricing
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
7.8
66 Ratings
3% above category average
OpenAir PSA
7.3
15 Ratings
4% below category average
Task Management8.248 Ratings8.015 Ratings
Resource Management8.747 Ratings7.515 Ratings
Gantt Charts7.221 Ratings8.09 Ratings
Scheduling8.330 Ratings6.012 Ratings
Workflow Automation7.032 Ratings6.09 Ratings
Team Collaboration7.040 Ratings8.012 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology8.518 Ratings6.07 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology8.315 Ratings7.08 Ratings
Document Management7.434 Ratings8.56 Ratings
Email integration6.430 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Mobile Access7.740 Ratings7.512 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking9.266 Ratings7.014 Ratings
Change request and Case Management7.928 Ratings8.010 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management6.951 Ratings7.514 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
8.3
47 Ratings
10% above category average
OpenAir PSA
8.6
10 Ratings
14% above category average
Quotes/estimates7.925 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Invoicing9.140 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Project & financial reporting8.346 Ratings8.59 Ratings
Integration with accounting software8.130 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Small Businesses
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.4 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.4 out of 10
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.4 out of 10
Planview AgilePlace
Planview AgilePlace
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(159 ratings)
8.5
(20 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(8 ratings)
8.2
(7 ratings)
Usability
6.9
(109 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(90 ratings)
5.5
(6 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
2.5
(6 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
BQE COREOpenAir PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
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Pros
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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.
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NetSuite
  • Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with.
  • Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow.
  • OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice.
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Cons
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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.
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NetSuite
  • Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages).
  • Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly.
  • During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires.
  • OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration.
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Likelihood to Renew
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems.

Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir.

OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
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Usability
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
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Reliability and Availability
BQE Software Inc.
I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
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NetSuite
The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.
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Performance
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.
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Support Rating
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
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In-Person Training
BQE Software Inc.
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
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Online Training
BQE Software Inc.
Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
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NetSuite
We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
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Implementation Rating
BQE Software Inc.
It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.
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NetSuite
It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
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Alternatives Considered
BQE Software Inc.
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.
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NetSuite
OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
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Scalability
BQE Software Inc.
This software works on a small and large scale.
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NetSuite
Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.
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Return on Investment
BQE Software Inc.
  • 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
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NetSuite
  • It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
  • Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
  • It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.
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ScreenShots

BQE CORE Screenshots

Screenshot of Core powered by BQE SoftwareScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Dashboard ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE 360* Firm Performance ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE Reporting & AnalyticsScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Time EntryScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Expense Tracking