Item: Quickbase
Rating: 10
Author: Ryan Dewey

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use QuickBase (QB) as a CRM system and to manage our subscription billing for over 20,000 properties that use our software. It has replaced salesforce for our account management team and has allowed us to substantially increase our efficiency for billing and accounts receivable. We also use it to perform assessments of how our clients are utilizing our software and to prepare reports from them.

Pros and Cons

Allows you to quickly build a functional app with minimal technical knowledge.
Includes all of the tools required to be creative and work around most road blocks that you'll come accross.
Allows users with advanced technical knowledge to automate processes and customize your app to solve almost any business problem.
The exchange includes many apps that serve as a good starting point and give you a structure to build around.

As with any SaaS offering, performance can vary greatly throughout the day.
Reports can get bogged down easily if there are too many formulas or filters applied.
Sync feature is great but it is still inconsistent.
Ability to refine user roles and permissions could be a bit better.

Ease of Building Custom Applications

We certainly have achieved this. As a software development company we have used our in-house development team to create and maintain internal applications before. This is always something that gets put on their back burner and causes plenty of frustration for the end-users. With Quickbase we don't need to wait around for weeks for them to make an update, if I want to add a field or change a form I can do it in seconds instead.

Citizen Developers Using Quickbase

Very little technical knowledge is required. As long as someone is proficient with computers and understands how they operate and has some idea of how databases work, it doesn't take long to get a good understanding of almost everything Quickbase can do. I myself am an accountant with no formal technical training but with Quickbase I was able to get started quickly with basic functions and work may way through to the more advanced functions.

Goals with Quickbase

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

Ease of Updating Applications

I am constantly updating our Quickbase applications. As long as you keep good documentation (or at least understand all of the relationships in the app) and properly train the end-users, it is very easy to make updates. If you get ahead of yourself (which is easy to do with QB) and make an update without complete knowledge of what it might affect, it can cause you some headaches down the road and cause some frustration with the end-users.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for a variety of functions, including project management, CRM, and basically anything you would do in a spreadsheet that you want to be able to build out a little more and integrate with other functions. The only area I've found where it is limited is where you are tracking cumulative data and want to be able to track changes. There is no way to create a report showing a field's value at different points in time (in our case # of properties using our system of time).

Great product for almost any business need.

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase