Quickbase

I think handling big data is where it hits the limit. It's a pretty obvious ceiling that exists with that. But I think developing a simple app with not a large amount of data is what it's best at.

I'm almost in there every day, really. Any time we need to bring a new department to build an app for them, it's well suited.

Well-suited for any process that you have an Excel, an email combination that these teams are working on Excel files and they're sharing the files. So having them move out of Excel into the platform, share communication via tasks notes instead of using their email. That's the basic and the most powerful functionality of Quickbase, and you can expand from there.

Not suited: things that require a lot of processing massive amounts of data in the millions of rows that the system is not suited for mass data.

If you have a lot of information in Excel and you're managing a ton of spreadsheets, this is the perfect solution because it's very easy to integrate and very easy to manage. You can set up user permissions, you can set up subscriptions, notifications, everything is very easy. Now, if you want to interface that with other systems or interact with other types of solutions, then it's a little bit more challenging. But I understand that it can be done. We're not there yet, but we know it can be done.

It's very well suited for quick-moving industries where you need to be able to adjust to certain clients in certain ways. Like project management, I think it's suited extremely well in all personalities with accounting as well. I think where it may be not as well suited is HR, such as time off. We couldn't really pin down a good way to have the HR side in our business with Quickbase.

Quickbase is very well suited where there is a workflow-related scenario where different user can get access to different role based on their position and changes the data accordingly. Here Quickbase won't be well suited or less suited where the user wants to create the professional dashboard same as Power BI or Tableau.

I think it's well-suited in all areas. As a matter of fact, someone was talking about film and how they can use collaboration and information and apply it to a Quickbase database system. I'm just amazed that it could probably be used almost anywhere. Someone said even recipes for a cooking website.

So Quickbase is a solution to your problem. If you have a problem and you can crystallize the problem and create a solution, then you can easily code it onto Quickbase and make the solution work for you.

A good example I can think of is we have large-scale quality control that we use for live products within the industry. And we were able to up our ability to process by I would say tenfold at least. Just again, doing a lot of pre-qual and a lot of automatic checking that they could then we can hand off to our users for the more qualitative aspects. Areas where it could use a little bit more support: I would say large data tracking for quick responses. A lot of times we need feedback on a minute-to-minute basis and Quickbase runs much more on an hourly cycle. I would say getting speed of use of information and processing when you're looking for something much more shorter scale than say a daily, weekly, or monthly.

I've always used it as a sales portal with different permissions, and I think it's great at all of that. That's something that I haven't seen other people talk through, but at both the companies that I've used it with, it's been really great for that.

It's definitely been really great for keeping track of our projects, making sure that we have an eye on what is in most immediate need of attention, what is being delayed, and for what reason giving feedback. Then improving our efficiency through the automation tools.

Quickbase is good about being upfront about where it's not well suited. There are going to be certain complexities around use cases or maybe just people need more robust functionality and a better system might be suited for them because it's going to be more specific to a niche. Quickbase is going to come in when you have so many different systems and so much going on and you really just wanna simplify your process day-to-day in Quickbase and kind of take all those pieces, minimize whatever might be excess, and use it move forward.

It's going to be less appropriate if you're compiling material to deliver to a diverse audience that requires ad-hoc data aggregation. Let's say I'm putting together an agenda and materials for a board of directors meeting. The information that I'm going to compile is very dependent on the content of the meeting - and so it's not repeatable, it's not leveraging a data warehouse, it's not leveraging workflow. Quickbase may not work so well for that. Now, Quickbase may work well for extracting the data that you need for that content, but it's not going to be your go-to solution for preparing for that type of task.

From a really good scenario perspective, we've been able to, and we're actually in the process of it now, is automating the flow of information from our HubSpot CRM system and all of our client data in there into our Quickbase application that we've developed. So that's been fantastic. It allows us to make sure that we really have the same information in the same place so we don't have two different truths in the world.

Where is it not appropriate? I'm not really sure, being the founder while I've been involved in the creation of it and the use of it I don't know what I don't know. I know there are things that I can do with the program that I just haven't really uncovered yet. And so that's part of our discovery over the next few years as we continue to build out new modules within our application to connect more with our clients.

For us, it's well suited. There's a lot of times in a day when I get called and it's specifically about one single site. "Hey, what happened at this site?" And I'm able to pull it up on my phone, on my tablet, and I'm able to research an issue. That's really what I like. We're able to research things with the way that we're organized. We can basically just, at the click of a button, type in a simple structure and I can find out the specifics of a job. And I don't have to go anywhere else to look for that information. Whereas our customer, it could take a day to research an issue. It takes me 10 minutes.

I would really like to see if it's able to utilize an asset a portion of it so that way it can be all-encompassing for our company or other companies. That way we're able to access those particular assets right away, whether it's pulling from a cloud or some type of cloud-based application. More AI would definitely help as well.

Project management is a very good area to utilize Quickbase for. I don't find any area where Quickbase cannot perform well. For us, it's for customer completions and projecting from a project manager perspective, including scheduling, we do not use Primavera P6. We were Quickbase-ing it out and we're killing it.

Once again, data collection, workflow statuses, reports, but I can't really think of anything negative.

Definitely. I mean, before I had Quickbase, recording time was quite a challenge and then we would have to get that time into our accounting software. I would have to review it. I would spend at least a day or two on our billing. So now every time someone enters time, I get a popup so I can review it and then before we import it, I do review it all the time again. And so what used to take us two days probably takes me half a day.

I think in our industry we probably could have gone with something that was already built, but the flexibility of Quickbase has allowed us to, I think, scale differently than we would have with a pre-built system. We've been able to really cater it to exactly what we need. We've also added some of the add-on apps that are adjacent to Quickbace which have allowed us to automate a lot of workflows. So it's been great across the board for us.

It is good for data entry. I think that's perfect. It works really well and smoothly for that. Probably where it could improve is being a little bit more easy to manipulate where you can change it on an easier basis.

I really can't think of anything where it doesn't really do what it does well. I like it for everything honestly. Products like Quickbase are designed to make building, deploying, and maintaining custom business applications faster and easier.

I would say in inventory tracking is probably where it's well-suited.
Where it's not well suited, I would say extremely early research data that doesn't quite have like a formalized schema. If things are constantly changing, it's hard for Quickbase to keep up with. It's also more that you just got to know what you are working with, right? So very early research is hard to capture in the air.

I think the no code thing is great. The fact that there is a little bit of coding takes a lot of people out of the comfort zone. However for me, I've been able to use what QuickBase does for the coding side and has made me able to understand a lot of other products and how they use certain things as well. So it kind of gave me a behind-the-scenes look into some things.