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
Really Simple Systems
Score 7.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Really Simple Systems is a customer relationship management (CRM) software deployed via cloud with built-in features like email marketing, pipeline management, and case management.
$8
per month
Pricing
BQE CORE
Really Simple Systems
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free CRM
$0
2 Users and 100 Company Records
Starter
$15
per User, 1000 Company Records, Unlimited Contacts, 1 GB Document Storage, MailSync, Custom Settings, Custom Reports, API Integration, Online ‘self-service’ Support Hub, Email and Online Chat Support, Optional Marketing Module
Professional
$33
per User, 5000 Company Records, Unlimited Contacts, 5 GB Document Storage, MailSync, Custom Settings, Custom Reports, API Integration, Advanced User Permission Levels, Online ‘self-service’ Support Hub, Free Email, Chat and Phone Support, Priority Technical Support, Optional Marketing and Service Desk Modules
Enterprise
$50
per User, Unlimited Company Records, Unlimited Contacts, Unlimited Document Storage, MailSync, Advanced Reporting, Custom Settings, Advanced User Permission Levels, API Integration, Online ‘self-service’ Support Hub, Free Email, Chat and Phone Support , Top Priority Technical Support, Dedicated Account Manager, Free Online Team Training , Optional Marketing and Service Desk Modules
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE CORE
Really Simple Systems
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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All plans include free customer support and setup help.
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.
If you have a customer/job where there are steps to be followed such as quotes, follow up, purchase orders received, etc. You can set reminders for a member of the team with their next step and they will be sent reminders. Works well as long as it is kept updated.
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.
Resends - I would like a simple [one-click] function to resend email campaigns to [non-openers.]
[Emails] that have been created but not sent or attached to a campaign I would like to see a place that they could be in [the] draft so I can come back to them at a later date without them appearing on the email list[.]
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.
Simple systems is great for smaller sales and marketing teams to log their territories and report on progress on their opportunities. There are many useful features such as tasks and reporting to show to management how opportunities are progressing and when the estimated close date would occur. The two main issues are scalability within larger [organizations] and the ease to duplicate contacts.
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.
Whenever I have had any issues, which is probably only 3 times in 10 years, the back office support has been fantastic and got me up and running again in a very short time. Cannot fault them at all. But as I stated, problems have been very few and far between.
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
We choose RSS due to cost. We are a startup and needed a great solution that did not cost [a lot]. RSS [fits] all our needs at the perfect price. We could not be more thrilled with our choice and it has simplified our client interaction[.]
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.
A very positive effect on our understanding of our customers and what kind of events are working well at the venue and which aren't. This will allow us to work more smartly when responsive to enquiries, improving our overall productivity.
Very positive impact on our current review of marketing and sales strategy.
