Item: Quickbase
Rating: 8
Author: Mike Sebo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Quick Base is currently being used to organize incoming projects from clients with the focus being on providing metrics on how the projects are being handled from start to finish. It is being utilized by 80% of the company daily. We have been able to consolidate many of our previous processes to one system, instead of the 4 systems we were using previously to track this information.

Pros and Cons

Reporting on ANY given information criteria.
Organizing of data in an effective way that streamlines our daily tasks.
Customization is as easy as right clicking a form field.

For us, and we are a very specialized company, I would like to see more mapping features natively supported by Quick Base. Currently limited to 100 entries, limits us on how we are creating reports for our project managers.
The app for mobile devices is good, but it needs more tools for the administration of our Quick Base apps.
Price: Quick Base is an expensive solution when being used by medium-size or larger companies that will require a lot of logins.

Ease of Building Custom Applications

We have achieved what we initially set out to accomplish with our custom Quick Base app. It's intuitive enough to allow us to modify on the fly and improve any aspect of the app as it runs today.

Alternatives Considered

Before Quick Base, we used a few different tools to try and maintain the information on our projects. Such tools were Workzone, Quickbooks Online, and Excel spreadsheets. We've been able to utilize Quick Base 100% for our needs thus far, letting other subscriptions be canceled, which helps the bottom line.

Goals with Quickbase

Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
Improving collaboration across one or more teams
Solving a specific business challenge

We have achieved all of our major tasks we set out to be handled. I see more room for expansion with Quick Base moving forward, and as our needs change or develop more attention. This, in a nutshell, makes me very happy to move to Quick Base.

Ease of Updating Applications

I modify the apps we currently use almost daily to satisfy other department head's needs. Other times, simply changing the workflow on how data is entered has made me modify our existing apps. These and other reasons have all been completed successfully. Once you understand how it works, it's fairly easy to make the modifications you want, when you want.

Likelihood to Recommend

Depending on the management pool trying to implement this solution, a roll out to a new company could fail pretty easily. We reached out to a known Quick Base architect to get us going. Once I saw how it all works, we've been able to customize and maintain our apps without any problem. Bottom line, it's a technical tool, the more you embrace it the more you will get out of it. It's a great tool for what we needed it for. Organizing 8000+ jobs annually has become much easier after creating the Quick Base app.

Success with Quick Base isn't by accident, they give you the tools to build your solution the way you want it.

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base