Building Something Awesome Everyday with QuickBase
November 11, 2016
Building Something Awesome Everyday with QuickBase
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
Reading & Math, Inc. is a national nonprofit that uses the person power of over 1500 AmeriCorps members a year to serve students throughout Minnesota, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin. QuickBase makes the management of these members possible. It allows us to easily comply with mandates of our federal, state, and private funders. In addition it allows us to maximize our staff to members ratio, by streamlining processes through QuickBase. QuickBase has allowed our staff to focus on our mission instead of data management, and we have found ways to use QuickBase over our entire program model. We manage member time sheets, ensure completion of on boarding of members, and it helps us be confident that we have satisfied federal regulations in the implementation of our programs.
- QuickBase allows us to quickly and effectively find solutions to day-to-day challenges, without costly time consuming development.
- QuickBase has allowed us to pull together all of our data in ways that simplify our processes and drive constant improvement.
- QuickBase empowers all of our staff with the tools for their own success. Our staff is regularly developing their own reports and charts to fully utilize the system.
- QuickBase allows a dynamic and thorough API interface that has allowed us to fully integrate other systems with QuickBase.
- Designing applications in QuickBase is not always intuitive. This has caused my organization to have developed an application infrastructure that will need to be recreated, because it no longer supports our continued growth.
- The array of rules and options in the form building tool does not always offer us the depth that we need in creating forms, necessitating that we develop forms in different systems.
- QuickBase does not allow for easy creation of forms for data entry by external individuals.
QuickBase is amazingly adept at allowing my organization to design and implement new applications and getting them in the hands of our staff. Tweaks can be made as you go, and you do not have to waste the time for development. Your solutions can be responded to in a matter of weeks, days, or hours, instead of months with other development work.
- Excel and Salesforce.com
QuickBase allows for a comprehensive set of tools to quickly implement our program model. It allows for up-to-the-minute data manipulation and reporting that we never would have been able to gain if we were stuck in excel. We have also been very satisfied with the on-going customer support of the staff at QuickBase, and they are constantly working to improve the system and involve their citizen developers in this process.
While QuickBase is incredibly user friendly it does necessitate some level of skill with database structures to build a strong set of applications. Our organization has really equipped a small group of users to be the primary citizen developers over the system. While this team is not trained in any way in technical skills, they do have a stronger aptitude for technology. While there is some level of skill necessary to create strong apps, QuickBase does offer numerous opportunities for growing your skills within the system. They offer regular webinars, articles, a vibrant user discussion board, and in person training to get the skills you need to manage the system
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
The majority of the applications we have developed in QuickBase have been from scratch or from spreadsheets. But we have built a few applications off of applications that had already been built within QuickBase. Building off of a current application within QuickBase was fairly straightforward, and gave us a stronger idea of capabilities within the system. It was easy to personalize these applications for our own use, and build cross-application relationships to connect existing data.