BQE CORE vs. Function Point Productivity Software

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.

Well suited in:

• Project management from estimate creation to final billing.
• Time tracking per job.
• Delegating tasks internally (and externally if choosing to use this feature).
• Creative agency environments where jobs have many moving parts and employees working on.
• Customer contact information management.
• Internal creative collaboration (brainstorming).
• Management oversight allowing team leads to review hours logged per employee to each job.

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

• Time tracking - like several time tracking solutions, FP uses a clock that will track in real time so that you do not need to remember how long you worked on a project to input later.
• Dashboards - I love FP's dashboards that let me track my personal utilization, the utilization of my team members and all of my open tasks.
• Reporting - FP's reports provide insight organization-wide into how we are doing and where we (as an organization) are spending our time. As with any reporting, though, it is important to manage the cleanliness of your data to make the reporting useful.

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

• Function Point often provided reports that were inaccurate due to bad calculations. The support team would work with us to troubleshoot these issues, but the fact remained that calculations were wrong.
• Function Point was purchased by a new parent company that increased prices over their nearest, superior, competitor, pricing themselves out of the market.
• Function Point's interface is dated, as is its code base.
• New features are being implemented not as software revisions or upgrades, but as new for-pay features.

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

• Receive weekly emails from FP team about new features being added and webinars to review.
• Always extremely reliable and quick to respond with answers to questions or concerns.
• Includes function for their clients to make recommendations to their platform.
• Allows for customization on the back end to provide the best solution/functions for each client.

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

Workamajig was NOT a good fit, after over a year of back-end setup. FunctionFox didn't have the financial integration capabilities we needed, but we used it for years and were happy with the service and support. FunctionPoint brought together the 30,000-foot view of the projects and resources with a simplified process for getting day-to-day jobs into the queue, which was essential for our organization.

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

• We have a much more timely and accurate sense of our financials since switching to FunctionPoint
• Our team is more efficient at tracking time, and we are much more able to track resources and profitability
• Our accounting manager is able to use Quick Books in a much more efficient manner than previously

Incentivized