BQE CORE vs. Soffront CRM

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.

Incentivized

Lead generation and follow-up with sales are well suited. Social media integration and reporting/dashboards for insights can be improved.

Incentivized

• 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

• The email marketing platform is wonderful. It allows for tracking and you can do AB testing with it as well.
• Landing page and form placement with other companies have also been easy. Regardless of website or landing page that you use the forms integrate and you get an email notification whenever a new lead is added to the database.
• The overall layout of the CRM is also nice to use. You can open up different tabs with information on and then go back to a previous tab without having to use the browser controls. It makes navigating and comparing information very easy to do.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Reporting
• Loyalty features
• Social media integration

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

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.

Incentivized

Intuitive UI. Responsive. Features can be accessed very easily. Not a lot of big white spaces between fields and buttons. Straightforward.

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.

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.

Incentivized

Reaction times and relationship with vendor is very good. Good answers and solutions to problems/issues logged.

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

Soffront performs many of the same functions as both of these providers but it offers a great deal more all in one place. I do not have to log into different programs or switch programs to get the information that I need. This has greatly increased efficiency. The pricing for Soffront is also better when you add in the other features that it comes with, in fact it saved me money when I switched.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• 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

• The software has been positive for especially on the email marketing side. I have seen about a 23% increase in revenue and new contacts by using the email marketing feature.
• The landing page and form integration has averaged me about 20 new leads a month for my business which is plenty to keep us busy and on track for growth of the business.

Incentivized