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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Vtiger
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Vtiger is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution with sales and marketing automation, project management, and inventory management capabilities.
$28
per month per user
Pricing
BQE CORE
Vtiger
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
One Professional - Single App
$28
per month per user
One Professional - Standard
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Single App
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Standard
$58
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE CORE
Vtiger
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$10 / user / month
Additional Details
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Discounts are provided for both annual subscriptions, and for high volume users.
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.
vTiger packs a ton of functionality and capability, but the challenge is getting there. In today's day where everyone is doing more with less, having a solution that meets a couple specific needs and does that well is essential. To me, at times I feel as though vTiger is trying to be a "jack of all trades" solution which ultimately ends up making it more confusing to use. However, on the flip side of that, if you take the time to learn everything about vTiger, I am sure it is an awesome tool but there is a learning curve associated with it. Finally, I would like to see more integrations with other vendors moving forward so if we cannot use vTiger for everything, at least it would have the ability to "talk" with other programs.
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.
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.
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.
It is as good as you could expect for a company that operates from another continent. Emails are quickly responded to and do not usually require additional questions or answers. It is quite rare for a company of their size to be as responsive as they are and that makes them a sound choice to deal with.
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
VTiger had better overall cost and native capabilities that other solutions lacked. We used Nutshell CRM for over a year. It was a very efficient contact management system, but it seemed that if we needed to do anything but record contacts, we had to use an add-on. We spent a lot of time exporting and importing between different services. Quoting, invoicing, and payments all had to be manually transferred to our accounting system. It was very frustrating
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.
Integration Across the Organization - What started out as just a CRM tool for sales is now being used for ticket management and project management.
Steep Learning Curve - It is not as intuitive out of the box and really requires a dedicated person to be a vTiger expert which can be challenging and time consuming.
Reliability - Sometimes features that worked yesterday don't work today, thus causing more time to complete the same exact task that was done previously. The thing that comes to mind specifically is the main search box as 1/2 the time it works, 1/2 the time it doesn't work.
