Why I use QuickBase at Beca
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
We use QuickBase primarily in our Industrial business line to help manage shutdowns. QuickBase gives us the ability to quickly develop applications to manage all the jobs, tasks, materials and documents required to manage shutdowns. The great thing about QuickBase is the ease of customisation. When the client demands a change, we can quickly implement the change, and suit the application to the client's needs.
QuickBase use has grown steadily in our company, more and more people realise the power and ease of use of this great tool.
- QuickBase is excellent at replacing Excel spreadsheets. Especially when there is a large amount of data involved or where multiple people need to edit the data at the same time.
- Notifications are simple to set up based on customisable conditions. This allows for workflows to be established easily.
- Customising the QuickBase application can be done on the fly. As an administrator, my colleagues phone me from another country, complain that they would like a new field, and I can implement the new field within the minute - which is immediately available to them when they refresh their internet browser screen.
- Importing and Exporting of Excel data couldn't be easier. It just works.
- QuickBase struggles with foreign characters. Many of our applications are in French, and while French characters work in most situations, importing CSV data with French characters still does not work properly.
- QuickBase allows for any number of roles to be set up, with permissions able to be set based on tables, fields, and records. The only problem I have is when I have one person who has two roles. For example, for a timesheet app I have developed, a manager should be able to edit the hours of only his own timesheet, and approve all of his direct report's timesheets. However, by assigning two roles to one person, the role permissions don't work logically, and the manager can now edit all of his direct report's timesheet hours. I have developed workarounds, but they are less ideal than if QuickBase could handle assigning multiple rows.
- Adding documents to QuickBase would be much more efficient if documents could be added in a grid edit report. Currently, the only way to add documents natively is to edit a single record.
- Dropdown fields in a grid edit can be set so that the available choices are limited conditional on another field (usually a parent record). The available choices can also be set based on filtering criteria. However it can't do both. For example, I have a parent table of projects and a child table of tasks, with status open or closed. If I have a grid edit for current issues in a Projects form, I can have a dropdown of project tasks within that grid edit. I can choose to show only the tasks related to that project, or only open tasks, but I can't show only open tasks related to that project.
- Copying from Excel directly into a QuickBase grid edit is very handy. However, somewhere between QuickBase and Excel, strange characters are sometimes added like "\n". This indicates that there was a line break in the Excel data, but I would rather QuickBase just ignored the line break, so I didn't have to delete the "\n" later.
QuickBase is fast.
Fast to build, instantly deployed, and easy to maintain. I currently manage several apps located in various countries around the South Pacific. All of this can be done while I'm based in Auckland. Updating apps couldn't be easier. The benefit of having an internet-based tool like this is that my assistant application developers can be based in different locations and we can all work together to achieve what we need to achieve.
- Caspio, zoho, azure and knack
After a 3 month evaluation period testing several other online solutions, QuickBase came out top.
In comparison:
Azure allows for massive flexibility, but also takes a considerable amount of effort. We use Azure successfully in our business for large scale highly customised databases. However, QuickBase has all we need for the applications I develop - and an order of magnitude less effort for development.
Knack and Zoho are both easy to use, but have limited functionality in comparison to QuickBase.
Caspio is much more expensive, but appears to be a bit out-dated. It is more technical and less user-friendly.
If you are any good at Excel, you'll find QuickBase easy.
For the people in my team who have helped develop applications, they have all commented to me on how surprisingly easy it is to develop basic applications.
For the more complex applications, I have relied upon a wealth of information on the QuickBase community site, as well as QuickBase help cases.
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
We initially used QuickBase to solve our problem of managing industrial shutdowns. Previously we had used Excel spreadsheets, but they grew too big and too cumbersome.
QuickBase more than exceeded our initial expectations, and now we are getting it to do much more than we ever thought possible.
Almost every day I am asked to make updates to the applications I look after. I have setup an easy workflow in QuickBase so that people can request updates through that and I can assign one of my junior developers to implement the change if it is easy. If it is more complicated, I either implement it myself, or guide a junior developer on how best to implement the change. These changes are seamless for the end user.
For the really big changes, I make a copy of the app to test the changes before I implement them. This would be easier if I upgraded to QuickBase "Platform" to get a Developer Sandbox, however, it's not worth the money for me.