BQE CORE vs. Flow

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

If you are used to using apps such as Slack, Box or Harvest, you will have an easy time getting use to Flow's UI. Drag and drop features, messaging between users, @tagging for notifications that alert you not only on your desktop but your as well email are particularly useful. If you need projects done fast and easily between multiple teams this is a great application for your business. A particular scenario where Flow is NOT suitable would be if you are used to working soley from your phone. Flows mobile app is slow, not user friendly at all and hard to navigate. Also, you cannot use a mobile site because it directs you to using the app. This IMO is a great desktop project manager, but NOT mobile.

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• Design: very easy to discern what is important at a glance. The UX just works; it's very well thought out.
• Ease of use: onboarding was a breeze. Was up and running in less than an hour.
• Support: in-app support is great, nice website too to find exactly the solutions we needed.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

• Better integration with Google Calendar -- it could be a bit clunky
• The mobile app didn't have as much functionality as one would like - you had to download two apps to access the features used on a desktop version

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

Flow, unlike Trello, offers its users a more organized interface and much more complete tools to carry out project management, which is why I consider that for the management of business projects of medium or large companies this tool covers the needs of each. In addition, its ease of use makes it much easier to adapt to this tool because it does not require a very learning curve

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• Our biggest issue prior to flow was scrambling at the last minute to meet a project deadline. Flow has helped us manage tasks towards a deadline to execute more successful events and projects.
• Since Flow is being used across our entire organization, the speed at which we can collaborate cross-departmentally has increased. This is especially true of our communication and collaboration with our Marketing team.
• Flow has allowed our leadership team to be able to see the progress of a project at any time just by looking at that projects dashboard. This has both given them confidence as well as let them know when they need to intervene.

Incentivized