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
Paymo
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Paymo is a collaborative work management platform that helps track team progress, collaborate in context, and make smarter decisions. It acts as a single source of truth, where project planning, resource scheduling, file proofing, time tracking, and billing feed into each other to co-exist under the same roof.
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.
Beautiful interface throughout, easy setup, most natural progressions are fluid and easy to use. Browser functionality allows us to use it cross-platform. Very reasonable pricing model as well. We have had a little trouble using Paymo for the entire creative process to have proofs reviewed and approved. Also, have to use external forms to have work submitted from campus.
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.
The ability to code exactly what time I worked on a project enables me to bill clients more accurately and within different minimums, which besides more accurately tracking time, this has been extremely helpful as I negotiate contracts for services and offer different deals with potential clients. Some are billed to the minute, some in 15-minute minimums, and some in 20-minute blocks.
The live reports are great, showing time spent in the minimums that I've set, while also including as much detail as I wish to share.
I've now started just writing my notes into the tracker, which are then carried into the live reports - this eases my needing to send logs to clients, as well as helping me to keep projects on track.
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.
It would be really helpful if on the timer tool, they asked you to switch projects when you stop the timer, so it could fill that time in right away for you.
I never use the 'My Tasks' because I don't fully understand how to integrate it to be useful to what our purposes are in Paymo. Some Youtube tutorials might be helpful
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.
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.
It is a complete, a bit overambitious app but with many features that are needed. I didn't need most of the features but managed to make the most of the two I was using. Also, I think it is a well-rounded app and I am considering moving some team collab there.
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.
Good! Fast, excellent, speedy responses. They always wanted to know why and how they could improve on something (good on receiving feedback, too). Not that they were much needed, but my limited experience with them is good; they were really keen to understand what the problem was really about and how they could help with it.
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 still use Trello and Slack, but Basecamp and HubSpot are too much for our operation to manage or integrate. Paymo is missing some of the tracking features of HubSpot and isn't as universally used as Basecamp but we've been with them for 8 years and they seem to know what matters most to their user base
Gives me more accurate time that I've spent on projects compared to older methods I've used.
Has data that I can pull together, for example my boss wanted to know the percentage of time I'd spent working on projects for one client compared to everything else - I was able to give them an accurate percentage.
Forces you to stay on top of jobs, which can lengthen the time to complete something
