BQE CORE vs. RationalPlan

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.

Incentivized

Appropriate as a great alternative to MS Project. RationalPlan provides most of the features needed to develop and maintain mid-level complex schedules. Less Appropriate for large complex schedules of long duration. These can be a challenge due to Duration at top-level. It is also a challenge to generate reports for management - reporting feature is limited.

• 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

• Portfolio view is great to get a feel for how your programme is running at a glance and which areas possibly might require attention. The fact that you can customise your view by adding your own columns is another plus.
• All project information in one tool is a big plus for me considering the amount of projects we run with. This really improves efficiency and saves me time. You have the ability to add documents to tasks, manage risks, email resources tasks due for projects they are assigned to(might need some refinement depending on your requirements), material db with costing etc.

• 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.

• Milestones should be a primary option instead of 0h to create one.

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

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.

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.

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.

Incentivized

I had to ask for support once and got a response immediately.

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

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

Incentivized

RationalPlan is cost-effective and allows most users to prepare and manage their schedule. The software lacks comprehensive reporting and duration changes at the top level of a project.

This software works on a small and large scale.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Helps explain the target schedule and resource estimates for cost of the project

Incentivized