Quickbase

Automation

Simplifying the process that is based on what we're using today, this is a much better overall platform.

There are some limitations that I've run into. A lot of it has to do with the amount of data that I can bring in versus some other platform that we use for the behind-the-scenes database. So hitting the data limitations is sometimes a risk, an issue, I'll say.

Nimble, Fast, open, no code

Relational database really quickly, joining tables

When reports reach a certain limit for us to still be able to extract those reports out.

Dashboards, reports, having different users have different accesses to the platform.

Being very flexible to make changes in terms of adding functionality to the platform.

Different fields, different formulas, having different users do different things.

Integration with third parties to have access to maps, have access to different systems, images, etc.

Missing functionality is a full end-to-end lock file of every change that user made in the platform.

Number two is integration with email systems. Having a client inside quickly so that you can import emails and have an email functionality there. Additionally, the attachment is limited in terms of size, so we need to use third party application like Amazon S3 to host our files there. This should be native in the platform.

There's more improvement in forms. I think they're going to come up with new versions, but as of now there's a lot of improvement that we can have in the forms.

The fact that it's a low-code solution is certainly a plus.

It's also very easy to implement and to interface with other sources of data, such as an Excel spreadsheet can be easily just uploaded to the tables.

We have created some specific tools using some third party programmers that interact with Quickbase, and it's been a great experience.

We have a large community of people that we need to interact with, and it hasn't been that easy to create some kind of portal to add a request feedback form from people outside the Quickbase system. Yes, I would say we probably need to learn more about the product and how to use it, but that has been one of the biggest challenges.

The efficiency of how quick you can modify, adjust, and add features - and the simplicity of it as well.

It's user-friendly.

The fact that they are always adding more and more, it gives a peace of mind that they added pipeline. So now we can connect to our SharePoint, everything's always fluid.

I would say that they do have a really good user support type network, but it's not as entrenched and not as many use cases as would be ideal.

Integration with third party platform

Provides real time data

Insightful analysis

It can give user flexibility to change the background of dashboard

The charts and tables are incredibly fast. Exporting to Excel or CSV is super fast. Migrating in and out of different applications is super fast. So I think everything in terms of moving in and out of different robust data systems is still very fast.

I think the one that pops to in my mind is a drag-and-drop feature. Some of our tables and application charts don't have that. I have to go in and manually upload a link or URL. I'd rather just take something from a file or from a URL and drag and drop it.

Ease of use

Scalability

Security

Faster iteration time

So the user licensing is a kind of challenge. I can have only a certain number of users if I'm collecting multiple data from multiple different people, I have to design some things like forms and other things.

Quickbase is great for large data information and processing. We use it very much for qc, pre-work, and automations taking care of a lot of the information that can be handled automatically before we hand off to our human users. Automation as far as transforming information quickly and effectively as soon as possible to optimize or optimize our workflows.

We've switched from automations to pipelines and we would like to see some additional logging in pipelines if at all possible. The more information we can get, the better seeing how connected it is and what tables the pipelines are touching, how often they're running, what information is running through them at any given time. That would be a big help to us.

It makes it easy to, I guess like a lot of things that used to be like really cumbersome and tedious to put together in Excel, it just does it for you automatically. You can set notifications and subscriptions and things like that, and build out a bunch of customer reports that'll automatically send things out to my users and just send them the information - that way I don't have to go cut up a report a bunch of times. It just makes all that kind of stuff easy and automatic.

So right now we're gonna have to restructure and figure out some archiving solutions. I guess because we're running out of capacity. We've got about, I don't know, 800,000 entries in one of our tables, like our main table that we use for sales reporting and which represents about 14 months of sales. But we'll probably double that in the next six months easily. Because of the rate of our growth, my long-term concerns are making sure we can house enough data and present it to people quickly enough you know, where it's not loading. That's my main thing.

There's a learning curve. I've got a bunch of people on my team who have not been building this thing for the last year, and I can't just assign stuff over to them, but I guess that's job security.

It makes it so much easier for us to be able to utilize the automation tools.

I think sometimes we just have issues with template replication. Other than that, it's hard to tell if that's a product issue or a user issue.

It takes all your existing systems and it actually connects them together versus having to purchase another system to then figure out how everything can get connected. This has been built up from the beginning to actually help accommodate that.

More templates that there are ways that they might code certain ways, certain manners to actually bring information into the system or highlight different data points, rich text images, things like that. If other users could use those as templates as a starting point, that'd be a game changer.

Centralized data aggregation

Workflow automation

Organizing teams. For example, we have offices in Singapore, offices throughout the United States, offices in London, with teams that are largely focused on similar tasks. They need to have visibility of what other team members are doing. Management needs to have visibility of what the broader team is doing. We have end-user stakeholders that need to have information delivered to them. Quickbase provides the platform to solve all of that.

I would welcome improvement in the data delivery interface. So right now, if I want to send my executive team reports and their on their mobile apps, there are some limitations. There are some mobile apps out there that are really dynamic. If I go to my Bank of America mobile application, it's really easy to get what I need. It's not that dynamic yet on Quickbase. I'm looking forward to the evolution of that.

I could say the same thing about emailing the reports that you give via email. I think there's an opportunity to enhance that, modernize the look and feel.

From a volume perspective, prior to using Quickbase, we were using an access database and that's great, but we couldn't really compile any of the information. So Quickbase allows us to take all of our clients in one place, and now we can create lots of reporting and analytics that allow us to really look hard at industries and companies and what kind of credits are we generating and allows us to streamline. From a quality control perspective, make sure that all of the calculations are always going to be the same over and over and over. So from our perspective, it allows us to scale much faster, much easier than using either Excel or Google Sheets, or our old access database.

The text editor in the program is a little bit rough. We use Quickbase for all of our calculations. We really have two parts that we document. One is the projects that the company, our clients, do, and we have to document how it meets the IRS criteria. The other side is the calculation, which generates the credit. That side of the credit calculation works great and we can certainly enter all the information into Quickbase to document how a client qualifies, but then reporting on that in a format that we can then drop into a final report and into our work papers could use some work. It's just not quite as clean as it needs to be. It's not client ready. So we've had to find some workarounds.

Quickbase is really easy to use. It's super easy to build reports.

It's really easy to build customized dashboards for individual team members.

I have about around 10 people on my team that each one needs to have a customized dashboard and be able to see specific forms per se. So I really like how easy I can build something and build it out and modify it and match it up for that individual user. That's probably one of the best things that I like about it.

I don't really see any cons. A lot of the stuff I see is more so positive. I've never really seen anything where I'm like, "I wish you could do this", or "I wish you could do that". I mean, there's little things here and there, but I can't think offhand. The positives outweigh the negatives.

Quickbase is an Excel on steroids that put on makeup. Excel is one of my favorite tools. However, Quickbase and being a Quickbase builder has enabled me to grow in my profession personally. Especially being able to build anytime a client or internal stakeholder needs something built for them, I can immediately do it within several hours and produce an end product that's easily received by the end user.

With the new dashboard functionality, they need to work on that and they also need to keep the old-style look and not get rid of it.

They should always keep the toggle switch from old to new.

Data collection

Workflow statuses

Reports

I can't really pinpoint any right now because I haven't had the chance to actually say, as the sole builder, I haven't spent enough time with the app to improve it better.

It's been incredibly useful for our task management system.

We keep track of our projects, keep track of loss, which is invaluable. I couldn't do without it, so it's critical for us.

If I can use it for financial reports so that I can have columns by year, by month on the same report and maybe I can do that. I just don't know how to do it yet. Cause I'm, I'm fairly new so that's okay.

I think that complexity of organization of data has been really great. Our data on the surface seems very simple, but when you really dive into it, it's very complex and it has a lot of different levels and it. Quickbase has allowed us to really structure it in a way that we can grow with it, but also it keeps everything very organized.

We had to hire out building it. It was a little bit too complex for our knowledge base. But we have great team building our system, so we're happy with it.

Gives you a large realm of what information we can use and put inside of it.

Little bit faster with importing the data. It takes a little bit to load, but then again we use it for a large scope of things. So probably speed of saving the product in there.

Keeping track of contact information, expiration dates, you know, simple CRM stuff.

There was one thing I sent in to Quickbase and requested about reporting. It was making multiples of the same type of report, but with one aspect of it being different per report. If I wanted to make a report to pull all the people from one neighborhood council but I wanted it just for one, and I needed to copy that for all 99, it wouldn't. I wasn't able to do that, I had to create each report separately.

High throughput development. Building a database and relating things quickly.

Honestly, I work a lot with the API and there were some changes to API, I think this past year or earlier this year. It was not formally announced the changes were going to happen and it broke some of our pipelines. So communicating those technical details more. I've already talked to people who said they're working on it.

There's a disconnect between the API verbiage versus the UI, the front end aspect. For example, the field types are actually labeled differently than in the front end. In the UI, instead of multi-text, it's multiple-choice or something else. There's a disconnect in the wording between the two.

Organization is probably the best thing. Keeping everything that we do. It's a vast amount of information that we have to keep together. QuickBase has a one stop shop for all of that. And to have a CRM that's very low code for somebody that doesn't have any background in coding to be able to grab that platform and use it instantaneously is awesome.

There's not a bunch, but I would say the most important to me would be the level of support for questions. Random questions that might pop up or, for the most part, anything that I say fails support cases are getting back to us as the customers for support would be the best thing that I could think of.

Data connection and visualization. The ability to drill down on connected data, that's very helpful.

Pipelines are helpful for automating processes

The mobile app needs a lot of improvement. But today I've seen that they're investing in there, so that's good.