Item: Deltek Costpoint
Rating: 1
Author: Eric Krantz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Deltek Costpoint 7 is used throughout our company to record time and do expense reports.

Pros and Cons

I can't find anything the Costpoint does well.

Cumbersome: Tasks that should be simple require complex operations.
Non-intuitive error messages: Error messages come up frequently and many are so cryptic that only the software designers would know what they intending to convey.
Non-intuitive flow: Filling out time sheets or expense reports is not intuitive the first few times you use it, nor is it intuitive after years of use. Error messages are frequent and not helpful.
Expense report attachments can only be PDF format, which means I can't take a photo of a receipt with my phone and transfer it directly in JPG or PNG. This requires (like so many other things in Costpoint) extra unnecessary steps.
Loss of information: In the timesheet module, if you forget to click "save", or if you click "save" and walk away and do not see an error message (with might take several seconds to appear), you lose all the information you entered. That means perhaps another 20 minutes navigating this frustrating and clunky application.
Non-intuitive: The many buttons across the top are like "what the heck is that? I'll click it just to see what it does".
Expense report redundancy: There are times when doing expense reports that the same information needs to be entered more than once.
Expense report searching: Finding a previously submitted expense report is non-intuitive, and when I do find it, absolutely no information is given.
Expense reports: When I attempt to find an old expense report (by again navigating through too many buttons, i.e., clicking time & expense --> expense --> expense reports --> manage expense reports), a new expense report is generated. I then click on "query" to find an old expense report, and it tells me that changes have not been saved in the current expense report (although I navigated to "manage expense reports" and did not ask the software to create a new one).
Outdated: The interface appears to have been made in the 1980s.
There are so many other little frustrating things in this software that coupled with the appearance and bugginess, I would call it the worst software I've ever used.

Return on Investment

Clunkiness of the software and learning curve required probably contribute to negative ROI.

Key Insights

Do you think Deltek Costpoint delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Deltek Costpoint's feature set?

Did Deltek Costpoint live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Deltek Costpoint go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Deltek Costpoint again?

Usability

This is by far the worst software I've ever used. Using it is an exercise in controlling frustration.

The software is so huge and clunky that I wouldn't know how to ask for support. Here is my example of support needed: "Hello, I'm filling out my timesheet like I have been doing every day for years, and suddenly this error message came up that says "Error: 6HX7: PLC not available". I just made that up as an example of the cryptic error messages, but what is that telling me?

Likelihood to Recommend

Deltek Costpoint is the most frustrating and clunkiest software I've ever used, and I've been using software for 30 years. The interface appears to have been developed before the internet and HTML and does not appear to use any modern widgets made for HTML. Every button click or menu selection requires a pause while something else loads. Our employees waste much time trying to figure out (what should be) simple tasks, and I've spoken with nobody in our company that likes the software. We've had trainings on Costpoint, but people still have issues constantly.

Deltek Costpoint is landfill fodder

Overall Satisfaction with Deltek Costpoint