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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PCLaw
Score 7.8 out of 10
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PCLaw is offered as an all-in-one billing, legal accounting, and matter management solution, from PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture spun out of LexisNexis in collaboration with LEAP in 2019.
BQE CORE is well suited for someone that wants to overpay to keep track of time, invoicing, and standard financial metrics. BQE CORE has the opportunity to be a really robust operating system for an architectural practice that wants to understand how projects are going, how they can improve as a studio, and move forward in providing great impact to their clients, all the while, spending less time in a boring software that no architect wants to use. BQE CORE can feel like a necessary thing for a studio to be managing growth well. But it also can be a lot of fun, intuitive, and exciting for an architect that just wants to be an architect. It can be a learning tool. However, it's too clunky, it isn't flexible, only reactive, and backwards looking for KPIs. To integrate with interesting equations of how a firm can look at project success, turn it into a dashboard for the entire studio, that would be fun. The banking cloud feed is one of the worst I have experienced. The lack of reporting customization is awful. And the amount of redundant information that has to be put into a project that you actually want to have phases in, track your allocations, and manage it, is entirely too cumbersome. BQE Core has an AWESOME foundation. But to build the proverbial house, we gotta care about the craft.
PCLaw is well suited for small to medium sized law firms with minimal accounting and bookkeeping needs. The software provides basic case management functions, and I've encountered issues with viewing or organizing new documents. The software crashes and freezes often, especially when multiple users are trying to access it at the same time. The user interface is a bit outdated but still very easy to navigate. You have to pay more for the cloud-based version of the software and it does not allow software integrations or workflow automations. I would recommend using this software only for billing/accounting purposes and subsidizing case management with more modernized products
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.
Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.
Like I said in my pros, it can hold a lot of matters. But, if your firm is very large, PCLaw may not be the best option. My old firm grew to the point where they had to switch because they had too many matters for the system to hold.
The software is definitely dated, and I have some issues with crashing and other weird/buggy behavior. I have to set the default printer every time I log on in order to avoid multiple pop-ups when trying to print a document/report (which definitely doesn't take much time, but it can get annoying).
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.
Navigating CORE is a breeze as the tool is visually organized well. Improvements need to be made to filtering. A more intuitive approach would help with generating reports and utilizing the resource allocation and forecasting tabs. Filtering by resource groups on these tabs are broken which is a huge inconvenience. Overall, though, the tool is easy to use as a whole, and the support team is very responsive and always available to help when you have a question.
The software may not be pretty, but it works. It could use a facelift but the functionality is still there. Personally, I would like to see an investment to make it prettier, but again, function over fashion. It is not a client-facing application, so internal use does not need to be razzle-dazzle.
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.
I have never needed to contact support for this product. Although it is suggested I skip this question if I have no applicable experience with it, I don't have the option to skip it. So I will instead attempt to get 50 words in this box as explanation for that.
Tech support for LexisNexis PCLaw has been seamless as far as I know. Those issues have been dealt with by others at my organization and I do not have personal experience.
I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately
PCLaw is still the only product that provides both front office (practice management/calendaring) and back office (accounting) solutions for a law firm in one product
BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.
