The Day-to-Day Maintenance
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
Currently, Quickbase is being used by a single division within our agency as a method of time tracking, project management and financial tracking. The system supplements other systems by allowing daily insight into project status, hours logged to the projects, as well as integrating APIs that allow our division to use Quickbase as a hub for document storage in relation to the projects.
Pros
- Reporting - Quickbase allows our teams to pull hours and financial reports and view the information in real-time on the screen, improving on a system where we would have a month delay on hours. This allows us to communicate with the teams on potential hours overages or changes to the projects in terms of finances.
- Customized Dashboards - This feature allows us to customize the dashboards that are seen by individual employees based on the internal roles that they play. We are able to add and remove reports and features that may not be needed by all employees and tailor the look and feel to optimize the roles uses of Quickbase.
- APIs - Quickbase has allowed us to integrate with other applications to expand the use of the system with relative ease.
Cons
- Set Up - This was more a self-inflicted issue, but due to Quickbase's ability to link between reporting systems and tables within the app, if everything is not planned out from a usability standpoint, the back-end of the application can get "messy" quickly.
- Custom Improvements - We conducted a custom time tracking UI for Quickbase as it was taking our teams a 10-20 to log time for a week due to the volume of projects and the standard method of time entry that was set up. We had to bring in a developer that was recommended by Quickbase, but due to the complexity of the system, the UI creation and implementation took longer than expected. Again, this ties into your set up, which can go wrong quickly, but customization can be costly for some instances.
- Occasionally you will run into problems with broken links. The problem often occurs between scripts that were created to automate some of the processes that are done regularly, and therefore need to be checked.
Smartsheet has allowed us to track timelines and dependencies as well as allocations more efficiently than Quickbase has; however, Quickbase is a financially friendly system that has allowed us to create custom scripts and formulas for calculations on some of our more complex financial reports that are looked at.
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