Item: BQE CORE
Rating: 7
Author: Paul Desmond

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use BQE Core as our Project Management, Time / Expense Tracker, Billing / Invoicing, and for Accounting. Every new project we receive to work on, goes into Core. We have been expanding our uses into dashboard usage to share with our team, Monthly automatically reporting, and KPI tracking. We are able to understand our financial metrics as well as our means of cash with reconciling from our bank as well. The only thing we aren't using or probably don't have a huge interest in yet is the CRM / Sales tools. We have been told multiple times by CORE employees, for a small company, we are pretty robust in our use of CORE and the project management tools. Something incredibly important to a small design studio is making sure we are managing the resources given to us effectively on the said project. Keeping budgets, allocations of hours, and our expenses in line for our projects is so key. Being able to filter through projects and understand how we are doing from a macro scale to a micro scale of a certain phase has been a big focus as of late.

Pros and Cons

Project Management
Time and Expense
Dashboard Layouts
Reporting options
Invoicing
Payables

UI Interface
Custom KPIs + Dashboards
Project Templates
Redundant Information locations
Streamline Project Process

Return on Investment

KPI Education and Metric Tracking
Poor UX Experience
Lack of User flexibility / security
Dashboards are awesome, really helpful.

Key Insights

Do you think BQE CORE delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BQE CORE's feature set?

Yes

Did BQE CORE live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of BQE CORE go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BQE CORE again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Support Rating

They have been helpful overall. Easy to talk to, but when we need fixes, it's always just a help ticket with nothing more.

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.

Foundation is awesome, potential is high, delivery needs work.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BQE CORE