BQE CORE vs. N-able MSP Manager

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.

It's a good company to grow with because as needs change there are more features available.

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

• Help Desk Ticketing is very easy to use and organize.
• Billing is robust and keeps track of client contracts and time very well.
• Role management and ticket routing client are very robust.

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

• Labeling/titling work "labels" without all the extra steps.

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

I had the chance to talk to SolarWinds reps at their Empower conference. They asked how we liked MSP Manager. (For full disclosure, we use their whole suite of products). I told them it's the worst ticket software I have ever used. They said that it wasn't the first time they had heard that. I did not doubt that he was telling the truth.

Incentivized

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

wont let me skip

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

I want to be clear. I did not choose MSP Manager, it was thrown at me, purchased by someone who did not understand how bad this tool was. I have used other ticket systems, Remedy, Spiceworks, and ServiceNow. Those all work, and do a lot of things this can't. We have to export a list of all tickets, then use BI tools to try and work the data, just to get reports on completed tickets. It's truly terrible. I would recommend having users send a carrier pigeon over using this awful awful tool.

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

• For my managed service clients, MSP Manager has seriously reduced the time I spend billing. Overall data entry time may be the same, but now it's focused on documenting the work that was done and the billing simply follows.
• The first few months of learning MSP Manager definitely meant doing lots of admin work twice, and double-checking the MSP manager invoices against the paper trail, to ensure it was accurate and working. Plan for this extra time overhead during the learning phase.

Incentivized