Quickbase Review
June 22, 2023
Quickbase Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quickbase
Ascena Consulting is a specialty tax consulting company. We focus on tax incentives for corporations. Most specifically the research and development tax credit. So any company that does anything that's innovative, they have an opportunity to at least look at the R&D credit. We document, calculate, monetize, and then provide support to them in the event of an audit. We make sure that the credit we generate for them can be used to reduce their tax liabilities.
- From a volume perspective, prior to using Quickbase, we were using an access database and that's great, but we couldn't really compile any of the information. So Quickbase allows us to take all of our clients in one place, and now we can create lots of reporting and analytics that allow us to really look hard at industries and companies and what kind of credits are we generating and allows us to streamline. From a quality control perspective, make sure that all of the calculations are always going to be the same over and over and over. So from our perspective, it allows us to scale much faster, much easier than using either Excel or Google Sheets, or our old access database.
- The text editor in the program is a little bit rough. We use Quickbase for all of our calculations. We really have two parts that we document. One is the projects that the company, our clients, do, and we have to document how it meets the IRS criteria. The other side is the calculation, which generates the credit. That side of the credit calculation works great and we can certainly enter all the information into Quickbase to document how a client qualifies, but then reporting on that in a format that we can then drop into a final report and into our work papers could use some work. It's just not quite as clean as it needs to be. It's not client ready. So we've had to find some workarounds.
- From a risk perspective, absolutely, because again, we've got a database that allows us to accumulate all that information very quickly and easily.
- From a cost, an ROI, dollars and efficiency perspective? Haven't tried to quantify that to be honest. Anytime you involve technology, there's a human component of process that has to be built. And so while we've built one that works, we know there's ways to make it better. We're still working through that piece. Do I think when we are three times the size we are today that it's going to absolutely bring more efficiencies? Yeah, I do.
I think we're still working through some of that. You know, our CRM system is HubSpot and we're not gonna change from that. So my sales team works in HubSpot. Our service or production team works in Quickbase. The fact that our sales team can go into Quickbase and figure out where their projects are at because they've been out in the field and they don't know certainly helps to break down some of that. At the same time, we've got a pretty good communications protocol in the company, so we're talking all the time as a group. It's easy with six people. When we're 26 or 36 or 56 people might be a different story, but I do think that it helps from the standpoint of, again, it's all the same information. From that perspective, it allows our sales team not to bug production if they need a quick answer on where something is at. So yeah, I think does help with that collaboration.
You know, having it in the cloud makes everything easy. I can make a change and my ops can see it right away. So it's been huge for us. When we were working in access, you had to get one person out of the application so another person could look at it. So this has been really helpful for us. And I love the cloud, the fact that I can actually see changes as they're happening.
We definitely have some complexities. We've got different decision makers at our clients and different kinds of information. So as I mentioned earlier, we've got the calculation side, which is a lot of financial information likely will come from a controller or a CFO. We've also got project information, which might come from a different group of engineers in the company that we need to talk to, to understand whether or not their project is going to qualify and get some very detailed stuff. We're working with multiple sources of information. Then within our company, we've got one person doing calculations and one person interviewing people. We've got different people throwing data in at different points in the process. So the fact that everybody can access it all at the same time has really made it very beneficial for us.
Do you think Quickbase delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Quickbase's feature set?
Yes
Did Quickbase live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Quickbase go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Quickbase again?
Yes