The Day-to-Day Maintenance
December 02, 2016
The Day-to-Day Maintenance
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
- 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.
- 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.
We have created a custom application within the QuickBase system, and while it has made some aspects of daily tasks easier, if not properly set up and maintained, the app can become more difficult to customize. Maintaining clear and concise notes of how changes have been implemented and the dependencies that have been created or changed is recommended as this eases the "learning curve" that is required when making changes to your app.
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.
Unfortunately, due to the level of integration and simple code and formulas that are needing to be written, Quickbase as a system does not allow for just anyone to be thrown into an administrative role from a technical perspective. Often times we are having to create relationships between tables and fields that require a deeper knowledge of the system than your everyday user. While knowing coding (C++, HTML, etc.) is not required to maintain the system, if you do not have someone that can write code, you will be relying on developers and programmers to automate some of the day to day tasks that do not come standard on the platform. From a personal recommendation, someone that is tech savvy, does not need to be able to program, that can manage the system on a day-to-day basis would be ideal.
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
As stated earlier, we updated the user interface (UI) on our time-tracking system, and due to the configuration of our system, we ran into integration problems, and usability problems initially, but was eventually sorted out. The update to the UI took longer and was more costly than initially expected, but again that was more on our end than an issue with QuickBase.