Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If using other cloud applications and you wish to create Zoho Books transactions via APIs, Zoho Books is great. The overall UI and flow of the application are great. If you need a detailed job cost accounting solution and robust reporting there is some room for improvement here.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Zoho Books invoicing and receipting features are second to none. We find it easy to quickly invoice clients and add items to their bills and also for our own receipting internally. The accounting features are great for our accounting team to be able to see where we are financially and how the business is doing. The ability to add contacts and run a mini CRM channel with clients within Zoho is invaluable. Since we use this in conjunction with our other CRM channels, it helps to have a centralized place to follow up and see through a sales funnel. Zoho Books allows us to take payments from clients around the globe a feature we didn't have when we used another accounting system. The pricing for Zoho Books is fairly reasonable for an SME organization which is a great for us as it pays itself back many times over every month. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Zoho Books is only available in Texas and California. There is no integration allowed for paying employee expenses. The absolute worst aspect is the fact that if you make even the slightest error in data input there is no backing up. You cannot undo an error. The system does not allow change once implemented, so you must get every one of your beginning balances perfect. The practice of Journal Entries is cumbersome. When reconciling, Zoho Books has adopted a number of required steps that significantly overcomplicate reconciliation using practices that are not consistent with general accounting principles in the US. On the customer side, you must look in two places to see the beginning balance and the current receivables that might exist for current invoicing. The way the system works, you must avoid having much trust with the balances depicted. So far, it appears that Zoho Books uses what we called in school "that new math." It would be terrifying to rely on this bookkeeping system to support an IRS Audit. The system violates too many fundamental accounting principles. The software is used by so few people that there is concern that we might never find a skilled bookkeeper. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Customization is the biggest struggle for us and most of the time we need to involve a tech person. The chat support is a great feature and very helpful. It would be great to be able to customize and create invoices and correspondence (templates) such are reminders in multiple languages within one organization. The currency (USD) would be the same. We have clients in different countries that don't speak English but pay in USD.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.
Read full review Online Training Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
Read full review Implementation Rating It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We had a lot of problems with
Exact Online , support-wise and price-wise. So Zoho Books wins on every point there. While Exact offers way more options, it tends to be really slow... and complex. Again Zoho Books wins. If you want an easy-to-use tool and not pay a lot of money, or if you are a small administration office with a few clients, this tool will be perfect for you.
Read full review Scalability This software works on a small and large scale.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Integration: Zoho Books offers out of the box integrations to extend the functionality and connect with the applications you love like MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, PandaDoc, and Quickbooks, etc. Flexibility makes Zoho Books great! Since I can use forecast reports, I can create customizable sales forecast data from the dashboard to accurately measure revenue forecasts and establish sales quotas. Read full review ScreenShots